


The sand murmurs (that it wants to swallow everything)

by SaturnChild



Series: What we left behind (in the sand castles) [1]
Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Punisher (Comics), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Aftercare, Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Military, Angst, Anxiety Disorder, Billy Russo is nice, Blood and Injury, Break Up, Canon Disabled Character, Child Soldier Matt Murdock, Child Soldiers, Curtis Hoyle Is a Good Bro, Dehumanization, Developing Relationship, Dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, F/M, Flashbacks, Frank Castle Angst, Getting Back Together, Hurt Matt Murdock, Hurt/Comfort, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Mental Breakdown, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Past Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Frank Castle, Slow Burn, Touch-Starved, War, Whump, depressed matt murdock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 06:28:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29522250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaturnChild/pseuds/SaturnChild
Summary: It’s been two years, but Matt still deals with the aftermath of Kandahar and everything that came before (and after). Including Frank leaving.And Frank? He deals with the guilt. He brought pieces of himself back from Afghanistan but he’s quite sure Matthew never really left the sand.
Relationships: Curtis Hoyle & Matt Murdock, Frank Castle & Curtis Hoyle, Frank Castle & Matt Murdock, Frank Castle/Matt Murdock, Matt Murdock & Billy Russo, Matt Murdock & Elektra Natchios, Matt Murdock & Franklin "Foggy" Nelson
Series: What we left behind (in the sand castles) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2168823
Comments: 34
Kudos: 64





	1. I can't tell the ocean from an empty shell

**Author's Note:**

> Hello there! This is my first multi-chapter work and I've been terribly excited to get it started.  
> This will all be part of a series and there will be more than one multi-chapter works on it (so yes, someone's excited)
> 
> So, this is an AU where Matt is a child soldier recruited by the Chaste when he was really young and, in a mission gone wrong, was captured by a CIA agent (no one other than William Rawlins, agent Orange). He's trained and dehumanized for years since his teens and meets Frank in Kandahar, in the Operation Cerberus, which lasts a year. As soon as they get back, Frank suddenly ends things between them.  
> This story begins two years after they came back from Afghanistan and Matt is still dealing with untreated PTSD, some hardcore abandonment issues and the aftermath of child abuse. Summing up, Matt is a disaster and my poor boy suffers while Frank gets his shit together.

_ With the curtains closed, I can’t tell _

_ the morning from the night, the ocean _

_ from an empty shell. _

__

_ To my own flesh, then, I’m a Revenant-  _

__

_ Or is this someone else’s dream _

_ that I’ve stumbled into, the way a drunk _

_ enters the wrong house in the dark? _

_ \- Waking up, Jane O. Wayne _

__

_ ‘Matty, wake up. Wake up, we have to go’ _

__

“Hey, are you listening Matt?” 

The scar in his stomach was aching, and all the old fractures too. It was usually a telling sign of rain. Maybe a storm coming. 

Rain reminded him of wind threatening to pull the tent out of the ground, sand storms. Rain reminded him of somewhere dry, disconnected. Grains of sand in a hourglass, slipping through their fingers before they could make sense of what was around them.

Rain reminded him of a massacre. 32 enemies dead. Frank with a bullet woven in his chest, Matthew with his neck bleeding profusely.

_ ‘Don’t you give up on me now, Red. Don’t you give up on me!’ _

__

“Matt?”

“Yes?” His left hand is shaking. Again. He hides it underneath his thigh. Hates it when people ask him about it.

“I was asking if you wanted to come shopping with me. You need some new clothes besides... jeans and... and hoodies and jeans and shirts” 

“Isn’t that all a man needs?”

“Sorry bud. Afraid not”

That gets him a chuckle. He likes to make Foggy laugh. 

“Sorry, Fogs. I can’t today. Rain check?” 

“Alright. You’re off the hook,  _ for now  _ mind you, mister. And just because it’s June” Matt’s smile drops from his face, frowning at his friend.

“June?”

“I’ve known you for two years, bud. I kinda noticed your seasonal, June-themed blues”

“Huh” Matt should have known Foggy would have noticed. He’s the kind of person people underestimate, but he’s insanely smart. 

“Remember when I met you?” 

Yes. Matt does remember. How could he not? It was an embarrassing moment. He had been in the middle of a panic attack right outside campus, trying to find the air when everything felt like it was closing in around him and Foggy seemingly sprouted from the ground. Talking fast in his own panic, not knowing how to help. Stumbling into his words until Matt vomited his lunch on the man’s shoes.

They had been friends ever since. 

“You wear the same exhausted  _ I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-my-life  _ face every time June comes around” 

Matt knows. He tries to think of a way to draw Foggy’s attention away from the matter, but can’t come up with anything.

June. June is when everything went to shit, after all. 

‘ _ I think it’s a death trap. I think it’s a trap because it’s exactly what I would do. If we go out there, men are going to die’  _

They didn’t listen to Frank or Billy. And it all happened exactly as they predicted. 

Matt can’t help but sigh, touching the scar on the side of his neck. It had bled so much. He remembered how scared and frenetic Frank’s heartbeat had sounded that night. Just the two of them, in the middle of all the descending chaos, the bloody concrete walls and pillars.

“And... you’re not paying attention. Again”

“I’m sorry, Fogs. Just...” he sighs, giving his friend a sheepish smile before tilting his head downwards again “a lot on my mind” Foggy goes quiet, then. Matt can almost hear the engines reeling inside his head.

“You never told me... what you did before you started law school. Even if starting at your age isn’t as unusual... anyway” damn, he should never,  _ ever, _ underestimate Foggy Nelson. Matt knew he never offered good excuses for a lot of his mysterious behaviors and he knew he wasn’t a particularly good liar.

But he also knew he couldn’t bear to tell the truth. Not to someone so... untouched. So impervious to war, loss, despair. 

Being so certain that this is it, this is the way you’re going to die, and there is no one that is going to mourn your loss. Craving time just so you can  _ find  _ someone, find one connection to the world that wasn’t tainted by pain and rage and grief.

Matthew lets his fork drop. Food suddenly doesn’t seem as appetizing as it did before.

“I...” swallow. Think.  _ Think think think.  _ “I did some odd jobs, here and there, for some time. So I had the money to... you know. And studied too. For the scholarship”  _ and to make up for the schooling I didn’t have before. _

__ That’s not entirely a lie, though. Matt did start studying, during the trial. Frank had smiled and told him he should go through with it, if it was what he wanted. Had even given him some of his old books.

Thinking about him always makes this old, overwhelming pain crack his chest open like a thin layer of glass. Fragile and insubstantial. Worming it’s way inside like a poisonous snake, curling around his organs and making the pain bright and blinding and everything he could feel.

“Hm... alright. Well, I need to get back to the office, get my things. You’re going home?’

“Yes, just.. finish that assignment I told you about”

“Good luck with that one, bud, see you tomorrow, ‘kay?”

“See you, Foggy” Matt smiles towards his friend.

It drops soon after. Today is the 13 th , and he has no energy left in his brittle, patchwork bones to stand a moment more of faking. It feels like it suddenly weights on his whole body, skin feeling too tight for his body, bones too heavy for his structure. 

Matt stays in the diner for a few minutes longer than he had intended too, not completely sure he’d be able to stay on his feet, should he stand up. Like a hollow structure shaken by a whirlwind, unfinished and precarious, ready to collapse at the next breath against it’s skeleton.

He tries to eat a bit more of his food. Tasteless, cardboard mush against his dry tongue. Ashes, smoke and sand. 

Murdock finishes his coffee, left hand shaking where it lays against his left knee. He knows it will only shake more the longer the day unfolds, exhaustion and stress usually aggravates it. 

_ Essential intermittent tremor of left hand -  _ had said a therapist, two years ago. When he was forced to take six months of it after returning from the hell of Kandahar. 

_ Disinhibited social engagement disorder. Trust issues. PTSD. Exhibits clear symptoms of child abuse- _

__ Matt had tried to tune out of every word she wrote on her notebook during the first few months, convinced he wouldn’t be able to find out later. And then, he just let her talk endlessly. Asking questions he didn’t have the answer to, begging for reactions Matt didn’t know how to give.

_ ‘You must be angry’  _

_ ‘Must?’ _

_ ‘It was a difficult time after all. And he left’ _

_ ‘He did what he thought was better for himself’ _

_ ‘And how does that make you feel?’ _

__

Interesting question.  _ How does that make you feel?  _

__ Matt didn’t know. He wasn’t allowed feeling for a long time. How would he know how did that make him feel? 

(Oh but he knew. Of course he knew. He felt angry, sad, desperately alone - abandoned in the sand, once again. Waiting for someone who finds use in an hollow husk like himself to take him in, give him something, anything. Tell him he’s  _ human,  _ tell him he deserves the minimum of human contact and affection.

He felt torn apart. He had let Frank worm his way into his uncertain heart, close his strong, calloused fingers around the frail beating thing. Trusted him not to hurt him, trusted him with his  _ life) _

‘ _ It makes me feel empty’ _

_ ‘Empty?’ _

_ ‘Yes. It makes me... it makes me feel like it was all for nothing’ _

_ ‘What was for nothing, Matthew?’ _

_ ‘Everything. Anything’ _

__

__

__

__

__

__

Like all June, the 13 th , Matt heads to the flower shop before taking a bus (he’s incapable of using the subway or anything underground, really) and then walking an hour and a half to the graveyard in Queens. He picks up white lilies - Curt once told him those and white roses are the flowers you give to the dead, so he followed his friend’s advice - and, as tradition has it, he wraps them up with a black bow. 

Billy would have laughed at his shitty humor. 

‘ _ Don’t you think a black blindfold would be.. you know... more discrete?’ _

_ ‘I said I won’t dye it black’ _

_ ‘You should’ _

_ ‘Leave Red alone, Bill. What would we call ‘im if he dropped the red bow?’ _

_ ‘It’s not a bow, Frank’ _

_ ‘Frank’s right. It kinda is a bow, Mittens. And it should be black’ _

_ ‘I said I’m not dying it black’ _

_ ‘I gotta say. I’m taking it kinda personally’ _

__

__ He smiles with the memory because there’s not much else he could do. Billy had been a great friend to the very end and he didn’t deserve what he got. 

__ The bus drops him off at Astoria and Matt walks all the way to Elmhurst, walking slower than he usually would. It happens the same it does every 13 th of June - Matthew spends the day with the same rabbiting heartbeat echoing like galloping horses and making his tympanums throb with the sheer impact of it against his sore ribs. 

And then, when it finally is time to visit their graves, the numbness would spread all over him. Skin feeling too tight for his body, muscles hurting from tensing all day long. A haze taking over his senses and making him slow. 

Walking hurts at some point, but Matthew is used to it. Walking over sand is more taxing anyways and the memory of it is still quite fresh. 

His left hand shakes inside his pocket. It seems to be always shaking these days. A time bomb, ticking away towards the endpoint. Or simply a unsteady, frail architecture, quaking in it’s girders.

Matthew wonders, sometimes, which one he is. When it all finally becomes too much - and one day, he’s sure it will - what will happen? Will he explode like a dying star? Burn and hurt everyone in close range, destroy himself into tiny little pieces and fade into the nothingness?

Or will he just collapse? An upset structure with nothing else to hold it up, crumbling but never fading. Metamorphosing into nothing but remains, rubble, debris. 

Rust and metal. He smells it as he comes to the graveyard railings. Damp earth and grass. Rotting bodies, withering bones, decomposition. How horrible it is - it suddenly struck him - that people once so full of  _ life,  _ with such big, carefree smiles and so much  _ light  _ would all end up here. No matter how much they helped, no matter how many people they made smile. 

Billy, Gunner, Curt and Frank had saved Matthew in a way he didn’t know, at the time, he had needed. And now, two of those are here, buried under damp soil. 

He hates that he knows what state of decomposition they are, every time he comes back. He hates that he can hear the earthworms that made their way inside the casket. He hates and he grieves and he aches.

Matt crouches down slowly, fingertips caressing the three gravestones, put side to side. 

_ Gunner Henderson, Kentucky, U.S. Marine Corps, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. 1983-2016.  _

_ William “Billy” Russo, U.S. Marine Corps, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan. Silver Star. 1986-2016.  _

_ Elektra Natchios. 1990-2016. _

__ Elektra’s gravestone had been as empty as Matthew was sure his would have been, should’ve died that day. No service records, but she had been there and Matt had put under his requirements in exchange for his silence that her body was buried along with the other soldiers.

She had been an orphan. Like himself and Billy. Although, differently from them, she had been adopted later on. Billy grew up in the system and Matthew grew up in the hands of monsters.

_ ‘Matthew’  _ he remembers Elektra saying, the first time they were alone together in the barracks  _ ‘That’s your real name, isn’t it, Asset?’ _

_ ‘Yes, ma’am’  _ he had thought, back then, that she was like him. Taken from the hands of the Chaste and beaten into submission. Honed into the perfect weapon for their use. 

Elektra was great with guns and knives but she was sharper with her words, and she had knew exactly how to play him and manipulate him when she wanted. Matt had been lucky to have Frank by his side, back then. Otherwise, she would’ve gotten exactly what she had been looking for.

After all. Kandahar had been their mission. But Matt was Elektra’s mission all along. He just didn’t know until the very end. 

Even when he realized she had been lying since the beginning, Matt had felt kinship with her. He would have probably loved her romantically, had he not been so far gone for Lieutenant Castle already. 

He makes the sign of the cross. Not as smoothly as he’d have done when he was a kid, he recalls. But in the way Gunner taught him to. He had been the one to put him back in touch with Catholicism. And when Matthew came back and found himself picking up the pieces of himself in shaking, unsteady hands, it had helped him. A system of belief. A constant. A comfort.

Something to make him feel closer to dead.

Murdock had been so reluctant to talk to him, at first. As he had been with Curt. Billy and Frank had been easier; they were his team leaders and so, Matthew knew how to act around them: as a subordinate or a tool. Whichever way Rawlins ordered him to act.

They never wanted him to act as either, though. 

‘ _ So... What is your real name?’  _ Billy had asked. He never once called him Asset. 

‘ _ Whatever you wish to call me, sir’ _

_ ‘Well... I want to know your real name. And it’s Billy. No need for sirs here’ _

__ They had been warm and welcoming and playful, and Matthew only ever knew pain and conditioning and punishment. It was easier in the hands of the Chaste. In the hands of William Rawlins? Completely different story.

Well, he was dead now. Along with Major Schoonover. And Poindexter. 

“You’re early” Matt jumps at the voice, immediately standing up, hand instinctively reaching for the knife hidden in his belt. He never got out of his loft without one. 

_ Cologne, coffee, hand sanitizer, jeans jacket, mints.  _

__ The leftover mint in his breath is what gives him away.

“Curt”

“Did I just get the drop on the Devil?” the man asks, chuckling and Matthew elbows his ribs, cane held in one shaking left hand.

“Shut up, Curt. You have no respect, laughing in a graveyard” he teases, knows exactly what makes his friend laugh by this point. 

He found out early on that laughing between soldiers is easier then one might think. They find laughter in the same dark or silly things - needing the respite, the few moments of peace they can get in a forsaken place.

“How is life?” Matt asks tentatively. Even now, two years later, so unknown to small talk and normal topics. 

“Aw, com’on. You know how it is. Think I can’t see you from time to time, watching over me from the rooftops? Like a messed up guardian angel?” the man teases back, elbowing him back this time. Matt shakes his head with a smile, of course Curt would’ve noticed.

“Oh you know me. I worry”

“Yes you do, Murdock. Like a mama bear” 

“I thought that was you”

“Shut up” Matt chuckles at him and finally lays the white lilies in his friends graves. Silence is easy to fall over them, clouding Matthew’s mind with memories of the three of them. Of a time when it was the five of them. Billy in his silly, hyperactive behavior. Gunner with his jokes and good life advice. Curt always acting like a mother hen and taking care of them (and specially Matt, he had taken him under his wing as soon as they met). 

And Frank, of course. Frank had been funny and deadly, kind and punishing, amazingly loving and quick to be taken by rage. And they had been a great team, out there. 

A great couple, too.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there” Curt mutters when he finishes laying the white lilies down on the grass covered earth. “Frank told me it all went to shit, after... after that IED”

“Curtis you didn’t leave. You lost your leg, that’s... there’s nothing you could’ve done about it”

“I know. Still feel like shit though” Matt sighs.

“For what is worth I... I’m really glad you weren’t there” Curt goes silent then, after looking at him for a while. Matt feels a gaze like a thousand pinpricks in his nape - like a sixth sense for subtle, unrecognized danger.

Frank’s gaze, somehow, had never quite felt like danger. Not in the way it usually does. 

“Hey, hm... how is he?” his voice is smaller than he planned it to be, showing too much vulnerability. His first thought, as always, is to clam up and walk away. Any show of vulnerability for him is showing his soft belly to a predator and waiting for the bite.

But he reminds himself this is Curt. The man that got kidnapped with him once. That put him back together and argued with Rawlins not to send him out when he had infected wounds and a bad ankle. That reminded him to eat because Matt had been starved so many times over the years he almost didn’t feel hungry anymore. That hugged him when Frank simply walked away, two years ago.

_ ‘I have to try. I can’t just... give up on my wife like that’  _ he had talked with such certainty, such strength. Like he didn’t know he had just torn Matthew’s world apart.

But he knew. He knew.

“Well... he came to the group, once or twice. Never comes inside though. Hovers outside like a damn vulture” Curt tells him, voice toned carefully the way it does when he’s broaching a sore topic “Heard he even made friends” Matt raises his eyebrows at that, and Curt laughs “Yeah, I know. But he did. Apparently Lisa made a new friend at school, Leo. And her parents took a liking to Frank’s sorry ass” Matt smiles. He know Curt is trying to make him feel better about it.

“His head? How is it?” 

“Good. He stopped taking the migraines medicine. Said his memory isn’t failing him anymore”

A tension he hadn’t felt was piling up in his shoulders suddenly leave him in a rush of air. To know Frank is completely healed, from a round to the  _ head _ , and with no side effects... It’s relieving. 

The first month had been hard. Specially the two weeks he was kept in a coma. Matt hadn’t left the hospital room for a day. Except for the times his ex-wife and kids came around and Matthew made himself scarce when he could.

“It was shitty. What he did” Curt starts, and Matt immediately shakes his head “No, no... I think you need to hear this, Matt”

Matt heaves out a breath, silent for a while and then nods. 

“Frank, he... Things between him and Maria were done, you know? She had even dated during Frank’s tour in Kandahar. They had agreed on the divorce. Leading you on and then just ditching you like he did... it’s not like Frank. He fucked up big time”

“It’s his life, Curt...”

“Yeah, but he had no right to hurt you like that, Matt” Curtis sounds aggrieved in his behalf and that, reluctantly, makes Murdock feel better. Since the first day he came back from Kandahar, neck bandaged and limping, following Frank’s unconscious body all around the military hospital, Curt had been there. Hadn’t let him down once. 

The memory of Frank’s voice in his ear suddenly comes to the front of his mind, as vivid as if he was still there.

‘ _ You’re good. You’re so good, Matty’  _

Matt had been crying, back then. Shaking all over, blood in his hands and silent sobs quaking his skeleton as he struggled against Frank’s hold. Even when it felt so  _ right,  _ so  _ good. _

_ ‘Please’  _ he begged, and never finished his thought. He was unable to put it into words. But now, the words in his mind come to him easily. Now that he’s better at putting his feelings into sentences.

_ Please don’t give me something I can’t have and take it away from me.  _

__

Loving Frank felt like breathing after being deprived of air for so long, and not realizing. It felt like breathing until all the air was snagged away, sequestered in a tiny, enclosed space. Circling him, taunting him but never allowing him to breathe again. Like a river circling a dying, suffocating fish.

“I’m just... I’m just glad he’s okay, you know?” Matt whispers. Has no other way to answer to what Curtis had just said. 

It’s all that matters, really. That Frank is okay. That he’s not in pain anymore. That he has found something good for himself. Matt can deal with the disappointment and heartbreak, can deal with all types of pain. Even if he felt like a broken glass, constantly spilling, since the day Frank left. 

He wonders how long it will take until his contents are all spilled on the floor and he’s empty. 

Curt doesn’t say anything but he puts a hand on his shoulder. Matt grips onto the warmth of the contact like a drowning man grabs to a plank of wood in the open sea. 


	2. The shade that holds him close

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frank recalls the first time he met Matt Murdock or, how he was known back then, Asset.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't help but post the second chapter today <3   
> So, most chapters are going to alternate between Matt's and Frank's point of view. Some of them will be centered in the present and others, like today's chapter, will be more of a flashback. There will be a certain fluidity to the writing, because I'm trying to write this as organically as possible, so the format can change a bit.  
> You'll notice that all the chapters have a poem to back them up, like a background.  
> Hope you guys enjoy today's chapter!
> 
> Warnings:  
> Dehumanization, mentions of violence, abusive behaviors.

****

_ But man a second shadow throws _

_ Beyond the visible he knows; _

_ The mind, untrammeled, can outfly _

_ The nets of mutability _

_ And shake the shade that holds him close. _

_ \- Second shadow, Theodore Roethke _

__

Frank remembers the taste of sand with the same clarity he can remember the burn of a bullet.

He remembers the texture of blood on his hands the same way he remembers how  _ his  _ skin had felt, all those years ago. He remembers the taste of blood like crimson rust in his mouth. Brittle and bitter. Throat feeling swollen and unable to swallow the sharp, red liquid.

He remembers the feeling of not being able to tell if the blood is coming from his lungs or from a wound in his mouth. He remembers hot air in a hot tent in a scorching earth. Only dunes and ghost cities and terrified citizens as they marched with their uniforms and Humvee inside places families lived.

Frank remembers seeing  _ him _ for the first time with a clarity that scared him sometimes. 

He had walked inside the tent with a red blindfold covering his eyes, fresh small splatters of blood in his chin, cleaning it with the sleeves of his black, long-sleeved shirt.

He would’ve stood out then, even without the blindfold. They were all in their uniforms, and the man (boy?) wore black all over. It was the easiest way, for whoever was in charge of him, to mark him as the outsider. And Frank should have realized that, back then.

The CIA agent who hadn’t bothered giving them his name stood by Schoonover’s side. As soon as he spotted Red (as Frank immediately started calling him in his head), he nodded his head towards an empty sit between Poindexter and Billy. Even with his eyes covered, the boy (man?) nodded dutifully and made his way to the designated seat.

As soon as he did, his back straight against the backrest, he turned his head towards the man, who nodded once more. Somehow, Red recognized the movement and took off his blindfold. Revealing hazel milky vacant eyes.

Castle remembered how it had taken him a while to understand those empty, ghost filled eyes. And when he finally did notice his lack of reaction to light, things slotted together in their place.

He recalls the exact expression on Billy’s face as he turned to him, one eyebrow raised in a mixture of confusion and shock. Frank did what he could at the time, shrugging. He had as much information as any of them, being Lieutenant or not. 

They didn’t know who or what the man with the red blindfold was. And they did not know why the hell would a  _ blind _ man be there, in a tent in a forsaken place, waiting for the war coming ahead.

And he had looked so very young too. He carried himself like a soldier, no doubt about that. But not like  _ them.  _ There was something different in how smoothly he moved. Fast and precise even when doing the simplest of things. His hands did twitch impatiently, however, as he sat down on the squeaky chair, as if still waiting for instructions.

“Success here is a matter of perspective” the man, who they’d later name as Agent Orange, did not bother with greetings “It cannot be measure in battles won or lands claimed. Gentlemen, I’m here to offer you the freedom to wage the war that must be waged to finally win this thing”

Frank wonders now, three years later, how could he not find suspicion in the man’s words. And, in his bad days, he wonders how could he be so  _ stupid  _ to ignore whatever suspicions he had.

“What we will do will be dirty and tough but it will speed an end to this war and safeguard our nation” 

A twitch. The first reaction he recalls seeing from the blindfold boy. A single, uncomfortable twitch at the posh agent’s words.

“Major Schoonover” his jaw had set tight, back then, wondering why the agent didn’t bother to give them his name. Bill, hours later, would show the same suspicions and so would Curt and Gunner.

The Major starts walking among them. There were 16 of them inside them room. And they were it. 

“You were all handpicked because you’re the best at what you do. Inter unit rivalry has no place here. Berets, Delta, Seals, force recon. I don’t give a shit. This is who we are now. This is operation Cerberus, and you are my dogs of war”

Another twitch and Red tilted his head toward the man, eyes stuck somewhere in the ground, unseeing, but his head kept following his movements easily. He remained as still as Frank had ever seen a man stay and he could see some of the others staring with confused, bemused expressions. 

“The enemy operates without regard, honor or rules, so neither will we. The mission is simple. Capture, interrogate and execute high-value targets”

Billy leaned into him discretely, muttering low by his side:

“This sounds like the Phoenix program” he couldn’t disagree, it did sound like the Phoenix program. 

“Do we have a problem with that, gentlemen?” asked the posh shirt guy. Frank didn’t feel comfortable around him, not even back then. It was like sharing a room with a poisonous snake, knowing it was ready to attack you at any point in time. 

He gives him the creeps. The others seem seriously unsettled by red blindfold guy, but Frank had his instincts blaring the moment the bald agent started talking.

“Not if congress doesn’t” Frank answers, eyes turning slightly to Red by Bill’s side, who had a curious expression in his face, ears tilting towards Frank as if listening him talk.

“They’re fine with it. I’m only authority you’ll need. I point, you shoot” he states it all with a nasty grin and Frank suddenly envisions himself punching him just for the hell of it. 

He wonders if this man ever seen a battlefield before. If he ever had to look a man in the eye and know that you’re the one about to take his life. The pristine little get up and the lack of tan in him tells him he most probably didn’t. It irks something in Frank he can’t put a name on.

Castle turns his eyes to Curt then, studying his friend. He had been his moral compass when Frank had moments where he lacked it. His friend is making an uncomfortable face and that should have told Frank to pack up and leave. 

He didn’t. 

“Castle and Russo are team leaders; they will post all assignments” 

“Asset” calls Agent Orange, eyes turning to the red blindfold guy by Billy’s side. His posture changes, back going ramrod straight and face turning exactly to where the other man is, although his eyes get lost somewhere in his torso. It’s eerie and amazing at the same time. “You’re mainly in Castle’s team. Should Russo need you, you’re to consult with Castle before. Explain your skills and your main roles. You’re under their command, clear?”

“Yes, sir” his voice is smooth and blank. Controlled in a way that sounds wrong in someone with such a young face. 

The empty eyes, blank face. It all reminds Frank of a girl, not too long ago. A girl with the same eyes and the same face and the same voice who followed orders without questioning. A girl who stayed in silence when her commander took advantage of her and came back from the hell of war only to be humiliated when she tried to speak up.

She had killed herself a month later. No note besides a message to some of her close friends and family. 

It sends a shiver down Frank’s spine. Red looks younger than Clearwater had been back then and something ticks in the back of his head - a warning, a feeling. 

_ Asset.  _ Frank had seen that before. People refusing to use their subordinate’s name so they can’t feel guilt when they send them to their deaths out there. Objectifying them. 

It was degrading and wrong in so many levels. But Frank doesn’t ask, as he was taught to since the beginning of his career in the force. 

Bill, though, squirms uncomfortably by his side, frowning. Frank, at that point, only looked forward to ending this mission and coming back home for good. Even if he dreads it, at the same time. His wife had sent him the divorce papers two months before his deploy, after all. And so much was left unsaid when he hugged her goodbye. No kiss, no ‘I love you’. 

“Sir, I’m sorry, does this mean Ann Margret is not coming?”

As soon as they cleared the area, Asset was pulled aside by Orange who couldn’t have said more than two words before the younger man was nodding and heading towards Frank and Billy, no uncertainty in his step, even if he clearly didn't look where he was going. 

It clears all of Frank’s doubts about his blindness but leaves a lot of questions unanswered. 

“Lieutenant Castle. Second Lieutenant Russo. Can I have a moment please, sirs?” 

It turns Frank stomach to his day to remember how terrifyingly submissive and polite Matthew acted back then. How his fiery, strong and stubborn personality had been beaten down to a stoic subordinate. And how  _ beautifully  _ he had blossomed with the simplest of touches, with the most modest of words. How they had truly seen how bright he burned under what Rawlins had made of him. 

“Course, let’s sit” Billy, a bit more used to this type of thing (thing that, during the first months, Frank didn’t know how to name but soon came to perceive as abuse), was his charismatic and welcoming self, smiling big to the smaller man. Red had tilted his head like a confused puppy but followed them without question. 

“So... What is your real name? I’d take a wild guess and say it’s not asset”

He remembers how curiously baffled Matt had been, wide eyes showing confusion. 

“Whatever you wish to call me, sir” 

“Well... I want to know your real name. And it’s Billy. No need for sirs here” 

“Bill...” Frank tried warning. He didn’t want trouble with Posh Guy Whatever His Name in their first day. 

“Are you under direct orders not to tell?” 

“Not... exactly, si- Billy” 

“So, if you’re not under any orders” Bill had smiled sympathetically to the younger soldier (because there was no doubt in Frank’s mind he was looking at a soldier, enlisted in the force or not) “then it won’t be a problem if you tell, right?” 

Matt had been hesitant, back then. And then unsure, even when he opened and closed his lips, several times. 

Frank had been drawn to those rose petal colored lips even then, before he was aware of it. 

“Right. It’s...” Red’s eyebrows had twitched in discomfort, jaw flexing. Frank wondered how long had it been since someone had asked his name, how long had it been since he heard himself say it “It’s Matthew. Murdock” it comes out whispered but neither Castle or Russo call attention to it. 

“Well. Looking forward to working with you, Matthew” 

Frank remembers how his eyes had shined discretely and his shoulders had lost the slightest bit of tension when Frank said that to him. How his face was pure, unadulterated  _ relief, carefully disguised happiness, hope. _

_ So much hope. _

Castle remembers laying in his cot at night, that same day, mouthing his name, testing it on his tongue.  _ Murdock. Matthew. Red.  _

_ Matthew. Matthew. Matthew. _

“Now. Agent... The agent said something about a skill set” Frank prompted, and so Matthew’s posture changed once more. Focused on what was asked of him.

“Yes, sir. I have the more commonly needed skills and other sets of specific skills”

“Yeah but... how does that work?” Bill asked, voice unable to hide how curious he’d been “Forgive me if I’m wrong but, if I’m not mistaken, you’re blind, are you not?”

“Yes I am, sir- Billy” he pauses for a moment, as if waiting for some kind of admonishment but then, when he gets none, he continues “I am a human mutate” he explains, and Frank remembers how Bill’s eyebrows had arched up comically. “All of my senses are augmented. I can hear, sense, smell, taste and feel more than any other human. My skill set is based on that. I can track heartbeats, weaknesses, scents, body temperature, pheromones. I can track bombs and grenades from distance. I’m trained in most forms of combat, marksmanship, disarming bombs. And I also have no limits regarding terrain navigation, underground or not.”

Bill had scoffed in awe when the kid asked  _ “can I answer any questions, sirs?”  _ in the end. 

“Oh man, that’s really something” Russo had said, laughing in surprise and Frank had smiled at his long date brother. 

“And really useful” he had remarked, the man nodding towards him with a tentative expression “You enlisted, Red?” the marine couldn’t help but ask and Billy’s surprise had faded with it, looking attentively to the youngest.

“Not exactly, sir”

“Right” he had thought so, too. Bill exchanges a glance with him but doesn’t mention it. It’s not their place. “Looking forward to watching those skills of yours in the field, Red”

“Yes, sir. Thank you” he smiled for the first time, directly towards Frank. Hazel eyes lost in his shoulder. Castle had stayed tuned to it, to the shape of his lips and the softness of his expression, turning his head away a second later.

_ 3 years later _

__

He turns off the engine but doesn’t step out of the car.

Frank feels like a coward most of all, these days. Coward enough to avoid coming here for the last two years because he can’t bear to meet him. To see him.

Guilt corroded him slowly, like seawater erodes the rocks into sand with gentle, seemingly inoffensive waves. 

Today, he watches his silhouette from afar. Wonders if he can hear his heartbeat from this distance. The other silhouette by his side, Frank reckons, must be Curt. He’d never miss coming here the day they died. 

It’s far away and it’s almost night so their cut-out shadows are blurry but Castle would never mistake the gentle trim of his waist, the messy auburn hair, the feline-like posture, those long freckled legs. 

There are flowers in the passenger seat but Frank doesn’t move to touch them. 

_ Coward.  _

__ He came here on their birthdays, on the early mornings, always avoiding to bump into Matty. But the last time he’d actually been here was the day he ended things between them. Walked away on him on the day of Billy’s, Gunner’s and Natchios’ funerals. 

Frank starts the car again. Can’t face him today, although his heart begs him to. So, like two years ago, he leaves Matt Murdock behind. 


	3. The tulips are too red

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Curt convinces Matt to go to one of his group meetings. Apparently, he wasn't the only one under the ex-corpsman's coercion. An unwelcome acquaintance sends Matt into a spiral.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, I am back <3  
> This chapter is a little bigger than the previous ones. I hope you guys enjoy it.  
> Our bois finally meet after two years, but their interaction will only happen on the next chapter, be patient with me you guys
> 
> Warnings:  
> dehumanization, mental health issues, flashbacks, verbal and mental abuse, mentions of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), internalized dehumanization

> _ The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. _
> 
> _ even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe _
> 
> _ lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. _
> 
> _ Their redness talk to my wound, it corresponds. _
> 
> _ They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down, _
> 
> _ upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, _
> 
> _ a dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. _
> 
> __
> 
> _ Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. _
> 
> _ The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me _
> 
> _ where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, _
> 
> _ And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow _
> 
> _ between the eye of the sun and the eye of the tulips, _
> 
> _ And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. _
> 
> _ The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. _
> 
> _ \- Tulips, Sylvia Plath _

__

__

_ ‘Matty, wake up. Wake up, we have to go. It’s going to fall apart’ _

__

He wakes up with lungs screaming for air, convulsing inside his rib cage like a dying, agonizing bird. An inhale stuck in his parched throat, only a whisper of pain and horror exhaling from his cracked, dry lips. 

Where is he? 

_ Under the rubble, it’s going to collapse, crumble right on top of him, crush him into nothing. _

No, that’s not right. 

In his loft. In his neighborhood. New York. 

He exhales a shuddering breath and fumbles around for his alarm clock, the one Foggy gifted him with a year before.

_ |It’s 3:49 a.m.| _

Matthew notices his shaking hands then, unable to grasp onto the sheets around his quivering body. They feel colder than they should, it’s summer after all. But Matt pays it no heed.

His body, once, was ready for battle in a snap of a finger. One command and there’d be nothing able to stop him. Enduring abuse in levels no human should endure. Standing up, even if he shouldn’t be able to move. 

Now, Murdock felt like little more than a sunken, rust-red engine. Failing, defective and underwater - choking on it’s own lack of use. Because that’s all Matt had ever been intended to, wasn’t it?

Use. A weapon, an instrument. An  _ asset.  _

His head is filled with cotton and his thought process feels too slow and numb, but Matthew still gets out of bed. He heads for a shower, knowing well that the warmth and the sound of water muffling the outside world would be enough to at least diminish his shaking body and cold skin.

It does work and he does stop trembling. All of him, except for his left hand. 

He notices it and sighs. No use dwelling on it, he didn’t know what to do to make it stop and it had only ever increased over the two years since he had been back. 

It’s before dawn so he heads back to bed, hip bumping his nightstand on they way. He’s sitting on the bed when he hears the sound of something falling over.

Matthew doesn’t need to analyze the sound to know what it is. Besides his clock, that was much heavier, there was only one other thing on top of his bedside table that could make that sound, and that’s a photograph from three years or so ago. 

One he doesn’t have much use to, but he can’t just give away. Billy was the one who gave him it, after all.

He did know what was in the picture, though. Frank had once described it in detail for him, asking if he could feel something with his fingertips. And Matt could, overall, notice some shapes that had more ink than others, but nothing beyond that.

He remembers when they took the picture too. 

Gunner, on the far left side, wearing his stupid hat and with one arm around Curt’s shoulders. The height difference between the two, he was told, was a bit amusing. Curt right by his side, one hand on Frank’s shoulder and the other on Gunner’s. 

Frank, with one hand behind Curt’s head making a peace sign and the other holding Matt by his shoulders, pulling him close (that part Billy told him, teasing his friend). And Bill, of course, one long arm around Matt, fingertips reaching Frank to make a sign over his head, and the other one holding up a jacket. 

A military jacket. A jacket the four of them had made for Matt. Along with dog tags. 

It wasn’t necessary or accurate. Matthew was an illegal asset. He had never enlisted, he wasn’t on any of the records. Only in some black ops had he been mentioned, but never as a CIA asset. 

The dog tags and the jacket had his name embossed, so he could read it with his finger tips. His real name. Back then, right in the beginning, it had felt surreal that, after years without even hearing a mention of his name, he’d be called by it once more. And so often, too.

Matt had cried for the first time in eight years that day. His chest feeling like this big, empty cavity that ached  _ so much  _ because he couldn’t  _ possibly _ fill it with that much emotion. And he had felt so bright and bursting out of his skin with it. 

Bill had held him for a while, that day. He, more than the others, understood him. They were both orphans, after all, who had had some really shitty experiences through life. And the need for belonging was as strong as their hesitance to trust.

Trusting words was almost hopeless, for the both of them. The gestures were what really mattered - palpable and true.

Frank, afterwards, had done the same. Hugging him close. 

_ ‘You’re one of us, Matty. We got your back, yeah? We got you’  _ he had muttered low by his ear, intended only for Matthew alone to hear his words. So gentle-natured for a man that turned into a machine when in the battlefield. A man that, a month later, would gain the nickname Punisher among them. A nickname he got because of Matt.

Now, with half of his brothers dead and one who willingly chose to leave him behind, Matthew isn’t sure of anything. The certainties he had at the time by their side faded and the doubts found cracks to sneak inside - and now, Matt can’t erase them.

Not a soldier, for he never enlisted and was forever an outsider. Not a civilian, for he had been to war and unleashed chaos for years since his teens. Not a warrior, for he never finished the training with Stick and the Chaste and was instead left to suffer at the hands of a sick,  _ sick _ man like Rawlins.

Not even an asset. Not anymore. Not a brother, maybe only to Curt. Since he had been way more than a brother to Frank before he became nothing at all. 

_ ‘Your name’ _

_ ‘Matt-’ _ he heard the cattle prod before it touched and singed his skin.

_ ‘Your NAME’ _

_ Lips trembling, teeth chattering, muscles contracting, body convulsing, skin burned, pain, so much pain- _

_ ‘Asset! It’s asset it’s asset, please I’m sorry, don’t- please I’m sorry I’m sorry’ _

__

He curls into himself under his bed. Like he had done when he was a child at the man’s sick hands. And he cries and holds onto the jacket that no longer smelled of a mixture of Frank’s skin and his own. He holds onto it so he won’t crumble and wither away. Like it’s the only weight keeping him tethered to earth.

He holds onto it so the memories won’t deteriorate and fade from his mind, so he knows that once he was wanted, a _ nd loved, and needed- _

Matt thinks of an orphan, like him, with big smiles and warm hugs and bad jokes; and a man who could shoot an arrow like nothing else and sang sailor songs for the entire barrack to hear. 

He thinks of Curt, screaming for him to run when a kid holding a bomb ran inside of a building. He thinks of them trapped under the rubble, in a dark that felt all-consuming and devouring.

He doesn’t think of Frank’s voice begging him to wake up, because that would shatter his heart into pieces and he’s not sure there’s much left inside of him to keep going after that happens.

Their unit used to call Curt a mother hen. He took care of his people. Not only in the field as a corpsman, but as a friend. He worried for their health, their mental health and anything else. 

And he had a terrible knack to smell bullshit. So if he thought someone needed help or wasn’t feeling too good, he’d know. 

That’s why Matt isn’t as surprised as he should be when, two hours later, his phone rings.

_ Curtis. Curtis. Curtis. _

There’s rain coming, he notes. Had been noticing it since a few days ago. Matthew can feel it as a current in his skin, making his hair stand on end, his nape tingling. He can smell the shuddering breath of humidity in the air. His left hand shakes harder by his side and Matt pointedly does not remember of mud and sandstorms and IEDs.

“Curt”

“Matt. How you doing?”

“You tell me” Matt sasses back, clenching and unclenching his hand, leaning back against the chair. “You’re the one who always knows”

“You got me all figured out, huh Devil?”

“I didn’t need to. You quoted me 37 effects of sleep deprivation and 20 possible complications of badly healed fractures before”

Curt snorts at the other end of the line.

“You looked like a zombie, someone gotta do it”

“Yeah, alright”

“Look...” Matt could tell that tone of voice apart from any other. He was about to say something he didn’t know if Matt was going to enjoy hearing. “There will be a vet meeting today. Thought you might wanna try it out. God forbid, you might even  _ talk  _ to people, Murdock”

Matt rolls his eyes.

“I do talk to people, you prick”

“No you don’t”

“No I don’t” Matt chuckles then. It was easy to talk to Curt, these days. He had become a constant in his life. Always there for Matt. For  _ them. _

_ ‘Curt, my man, it’s barely a scratch!’ _

_ ‘And still, it needs stitching, Russo. Shut up and let me do my job’ _

_ ‘Oh there he is. Thought Mama Curt had hidden from the sun, you back in business?’ _

_ ‘And you shut up too, Frank. It’s yo ass I might be stitching tomorrow’ _

Frank scoffed, cleaning his guns in a corner.

_ ‘You at least got a tetanus shot?’ _

_ ‘A teta what?’ _

_ ‘Oh goddamn it Bill’  _ Billy had laughed in his face.

‘ _ Of course I did. It’s required, remember?’ _

_ ‘Well, I can never trust your slippery ass to follow the rules, can I?’  _

_ ‘Mittens, Curt’s bullying me. Do something’ _

_ ‘Can’t save you from yourself, Billy’  _ Matt had answered; they were covered in dirt and bruises and cuts but they laughed like mad men.

“So, are you coming?” 

Is he? It’s a part of his life he had tried to bury deep in an unnamed grave throughout the last two years. A part he only maintained in contact with through his visits to the graveyard and through Curtis. 

“I won’t be welcome there, Curtis, you know that”

“You will, Matt. You always were”

“I’m not a-“

“Shut up. Yes you are. And you were one of the best I ever served with. Records or no records. You still are a brother”

He clears his throat because he won’t let himself be vulnerable again today, and Curt’s words come too close to doing that.

“Alright. I’ll be there”

“Good to hear that, Devil” Matt smiles at the nickname. “Just so you know, Watson and Summers sometimes go. I remember Summers...”

“Didn’t like me very much, yeah” Matt sighs but nods to no one in particular “I’ll be there, Curt”

They turn off the phone and Matt stays in the chair long enough for his legs to go completely numb and his thoughts to jumble into nothings.

_ ‘Bill, pull his arms! This thing’s going down, Bill, we have to pull him out now! Oh shit- Bill he’s dying, Matt’s dying-‘ _

__

“You came” 

Matt shakes his head, clearing his throat once. Smelling around and tried to recall where he was.

He can’t smell sand, or debris. Or smoke, soot, embers, gunpowder, burst water pipes. Blood, so much blood.

“Come on in, lawyer man” Curt. Right. 

Matt swallowed hard, walking inside and giving his friend a half-smile. “You alright? You look like you’ve seen a ghost”

He did hear ghosts, from time to time. Ghost memories and ghost pains and just ghosts, too. 

“Haven’t seen much of anything lately” is what he replies instead. Curt doesn’t need him spilling his guts right now. Or so he tells himself. 

“Oh, you  _ brat _ ” Matt smiles, helps his friend put the chairs into a circle as they talk about nothings. His head isn’t on the talking and he wonders if Curt can tell.

_ ‘Did someone find Curt-..? Tourniquet! I need a tourniquet now! Where is the corpsman? I need a corpsman!’  _

__

People start coming in one by one. Nine of them. Seven men, two women. Shoulders heavy although their posture is at ready. Two just had a cup of strong, black coffee, and Matt can taste it off their lips. One other had an orange juice and sandwich from the Deli nearby. 

_ Stop. _

He shakes his head. Tries to pay attention to anything else.

One of the two women has cat fur all over her pants. One takes controlled meds, Matt can hear them rattle in his back pocket. The other women has a limp, shrapnel damage, the scar tissue is hot-

_ Shut up. Stop.  _

One had chronical pain in his shoulder, there is a tight gathering of heat, recent wound, can’t be much older than four months-

_ Enough. Not your enemies. You do not analyze allies.  _

Cat fur lady stepped in mint gum on her way, it’s stuck to her shoe-

Another man comes inside.

His heartbeat is as familiar as it had been before, and Curt’s own rate speeds up when he lays eyes on the man Matthew hasn’t seen for almost two years.

Matt knows the shaking in his hand gets more erratic because he can’t hold the water bottle Curtis gave him earlier in it. He transfers it to his right hand and clenches the other, his whole body going tense and taut like a wire about to snap. 

_ Stinging shoulder, smells of at least four different dogs, dry dirt on his shoes, probably works on a kennel (he knows he does, Curtis had told him a year ago).  _

Breathe.  _ Breathe. _

_ Wood scent of cologne, has scratches on his arm, overexcited dog, no new scar tissues, bruised knuckles. _

Bruised knuckles on a veteran usually means anger issues. 

Matthew  _ hates  _ that he’s so good at taking in information from everything he smells, hears and feels. Hates that his heartbeat is fast enough to deafen his ears and yet his body and senses are as tuned in to Frank like a duckling imprinting. 

And now his chest is hurting  _ so much,  _ heart fast, lungs not contracting properly.

_ Just brushed his teeth. He wears a different deodorant and toothpaste now. He had changed everything he used, back then, so Matthew wouldn’t be able to track him. _

Matt wouldn’t, he should’ve known that.

And then, there’s Frank’s heart. It picks up pace immediately as soon as he notices Matthew’s still figure in the small crowd of eleven. His breathing changes, gets depthless before it deepens forcefully again. Matt wonders if his chest is hurting as much as Matt’s own is, for he feels like he’s being picked apart piece by piece.

His body is still hyper aware of Frank as he moves to an empty chair and sits down. 

Matt is nothing if a raw nerve, then. Exposed. The universe prodding and poking and watching his squirm and gasp in pain and so much  _ loneliness.  _ Having him right there hurts, after so long, skin as warm as it had always been, scenting the same, even when he covers it up with different brands of products, even if his hair doesn’t smell the same. 

It’s all  _ Frank. _ And if Matthew is overwhelmed with him sitting 3 feet away he can’t fathom how he’d feel, should he come closer.

It tells him he hasn’t moved on as one would have expected of him. One minute in his presence and Matthew is a trapped hummingbird in a cage, flittering and flying in circles, heart accelerating exponentially until it finally falters and fails. 

“Thought you were supposed to be dead” the voice is familiar but not the one he was hoping to hear. Matt turns his face towards it, red glasses glinting under artificial lights. 

“Summers”

“Never really believed it, though” he ignores the greeting, a hard edge to his voice “Devil is too hard a shell to crack”

“That sounds dangerously close to a compliment, Corporal” 

“It isn’t one”

Yeah, Matt thought so.

“Hey” Frank’s voice is pitched as deep as Matt remembered. A rasp in his tone that indicates caution to whoever is smart enough to listen for it. His body lights up warm with nostalgia at the same time his skin goes cold in a shiver.

_ ‘And how does that make you feel?’ _

The therapist’s voice rises in his head like church bells, ringing painfully in his right ear.

Matt’s answer hasn’t changed much. He doesn’t know.

Is he sad, for Frank’s attitude in standing up for him reminds him of something they had oh so long ago? Is he hopeful, for maybe,  _ maybe,  _ Frank is using this as an attempt to initiate something? Is he angry and resentful, for Frank doesn’t have any  _ right  _ standing up for him after all this time?

Curt, it seems, wouldn’t let it go unmentioned. “Michael” he clearly didn’t enjoy the short interaction. Matt remembers him intervening in the same way, years before, when they wore the same uniform (except the Asset, of course). 

Michael Summers had always made it clear Agent Orange’s Asset would never be welcome in their brotherhood. Who made clear he’d always be an outsider. Spilling his blood for them or not.

“Come on, man, we’re all the same here” Curtis tries again. The same argument, all over again.

“Are we?”

“Mike, man. Com’on” Matt recognizes Ryan Watson’s voice and southern accent easily. One of the men that had helped Curt out of the rubble. Remembers he had a stash of Sudoku magazines Gunner would occasionally help him with. 

“So... we have new faces” Curt eases the tension slightly, Summers standing down for the moment. “It’s Leah, right?”

“Leah Cobb, yeah. Berets. 4 years” 

_ Shrapnel scar, damaged muscle, can’t stand still for long, ate fruits for breakfast, takes pain medicine, concrete on her shoes, works in... construction, most likely.  _

“Good to have you here with us, Cobb. Now. Frank?” 

“Name’s Frank Castle” Matthew closes his eyes, turning his head downcast when he hears that guttural voice once more. “Marines. Lost count, I think... 11 years maybe?”

“You were born doing it, man” Watson is the one to point out and Curtis chuckles. Matt can’t help a tiny smile of his own. Frank’s whole body thrummed like a tank, shaped for war and combat. He was a fierce fighter and a scarily efficient killer. Built like an ox but fast and deadly. 

He had been a great sniper, too. There wasn’t one mark in Frank’s track record that didn’t go down with a headshot. He had been reluctantly flattered when Frank had paid compliments to his marksmanship, years before. Unlike him, however, Matthew hadn’t learned in Quantico but in the hands of a men eager to beat the humanity out of him.

_ ‘I said, kill him’ _

_ ‘Sir, I can’t... Please, I can’t, I can’t-’ _

_ ‘You will not leave this room until you do. Just enough food and water so you don’t die. Other than that, no sleep, no rest. It’s been only 37 hours, I wonder how much longer can It take before It breaks’ _

_ It.  _ Matthew hadn’t been a person in his eyes. Probably never would be. Just a thing.  _ It. _

__

“Matt?”

“Yes. It’s.. hm” he found himself hesitating, mind still attached to a ghost memory. He shakes his head and tries a small smile to Curtis. A sign for him not to worry “Matt Murdock” this time, he tilts his head towards Curt, a silent question. The other man nods ”Marines. 8 years”

Because the marines were where he found Curt, and Billy, Gunner and Frank. And nothing else. 

Matthew barely listens as they start talking. His ears still intent on keeping track of Frank’s heartbeat. It was a war drum, really, but it’s steady thumping only ever gave him comfort. Body fighting a war with itself, skin longing for contact, for him to lay his head against that chest. And his mind and heart terrified of the outcome, curling around his belly and snarling like a wounded dog.

A man talks about his kids. How they are learning to deal with his catatonic episodes. Another man talks about how he’s barely scraping by. How he couldn’t find a job and couldn’t live on the disgraceful pension, how he gave his life and a whole arm for his country and got back to be thrown away to the sidelines. 

Matt hides a shaking hand.

Since Homeland Security and CIA investigation were over, Matt had been monthly paid something similar to an army pension. Enough so he could scrape by while he learned to live in the city once again. The conditions were that he attended a therapist for six months, like all the others, and that he kept his silence about the matter. 

And he did. Matthew found that he didn’t have much to say, after everything he went through. 

Or maybe he just didn’t know how to say it. Scared of retribution from a dead man who can’t hurt him anymore.

The meeting is over before Matthew can manage enough focus. There’s a sound in the back of his head he came to associate with him heading straight towards a breakdown, but he’s good at ignoring it in favor of a task. His task, now, is to walk to the table in the corner and pour himself some water.

He waits for Frank to head towards Curt so he has a clear path towards it. The man probably noticed this was Curtis’ doing.

“You shouldn’t be here” it’s Summers again, and Matthew keeps pouring himself water. “This place? Is for veterans. People who actually served their country, who ac-“

“Was I not there, Corporal?” 

A presence takes over the ticking noise in his left. The devil is eager to play but Matthew holds him back. He’s the host. Not  _ it.  _

His blood boils, however, with a familiarity he can’t deny. His skin feels too thin, like it’d melt away should he tip towards the edge. White teeth grind against each other and the ticking rises as the presence seems stronger.

“Was I not in the battlefield, covering fire, hauling you from danger zones, taking bullets like anyone else?” 

Matthew steps closer and his skin has pinpricks as he feels the Devil’s voice threatening to rise in the back of his brain. He ignores it. It’s not his time. Not now. 

Summers heartbeat jumps with his proximity and Matthew can’t help the smirk in his face. 

“Wasn’t I there every time they blew us half to hell? Didn’t you use my body as shield more times than you can count?” he doesn’t prolong the conversation. Has no patience and is in no frame of mind for confrontation. So he throws the cup of water in the trash with a quick movement, unfolding his cane and preparing to turn away.

“You were never of us _ ”  _ he scoffs and then whispers  _ “ _ you were Rawlins’ little bitch and that’s all”

_ Tick, tick, tick, tick. _

Matt is frozen in his place as Summers stares him down. 

_ It. A thing. Someone’s broken tool. _

_ Broken thing. Use it, break it, put it back together and send it to war once more.  _

Matthew nods slowly because he lost his words, and probably won’t have them back for a while. Curtis is saying something, tone angry and outraged. But he ( _ it?)  _ doesn’t understand and neither does he care. So he turns and he walks away and ignores the ghost taste of sand in his parched tongue.

He’s too lost in his own head to notice Frank as he follows him. 

His mind, however, replays something the marine had asked him in another time.

_ ‘If you could be anywhere but here. Anywhere... where would you be?’ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Angsty Chapter, but bear with me. Frank's and Matt's interaction will finally happen in the next chapter and we will have a bit more of insight into Frank's mind and reasons for leaving.  
> Note that Matt has some serious trauma with the dehumanization and everything he went through at Rawlins' hands. When he's spiraling, he starts referring to himself as 'it'. Also note that he will often refer to his alter, Devil, as 'it' in the next chapters.  
> Hope you guys enjoyed this. See you soon


	4. I dig my nails into the earth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frank talks to Matthew for the first time in two years. A recollection of the first time he saw the Devil in the field leads him to a conversation with Curt and some revelations of his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey you guys, I've been super excited for this chapter.   
> We finally get some insight on Frank's motives and fears that led him to leave Matt. And also a little peak on what happened in Kandahar. This chapter occurs in Frank's point of view.   
> Hope you guys enjoy it!

> _ While lovers sleep, I dig my nails into the earth, _
> 
> _ holding up the traffic. Just now a cloud has pulled up _
> 
> _ while I was talking to the Emptiness _
> 
> _ of the Universe and my voice plugged into the waves _
> 
> _ at the bottom of the ocean. _
> 
> _ \- Arrow breaking apart, Jason Shinder _
> 
> __

The Devil creeped into Matthew’s voice like a spider creeps along it’s web. Eight long, thin legs carefully absorbing every vibration, knowing how each element interacts with every inch of it’s thin fiber. Matt’s mind was a two-faced labyrinth and Frank, after all the time he spent watching that transformation, knew when Matt had a feet on each side of the fence. 

The Devil’s tone, when mixed with Red’s was quiet and almost stale. A promise in an empty tone, vindication. Once, it was a marvel to watch how Matthew’s sweet, if not slightly social awkward voice, gave way to self-assured, deadly tone of the Devil’s. 

Today, it reminds him only of the pain it meant for the younger man. 

It was a physical transformation too. Almost a metamorphosis. The Devil broke through a carefully constructed chrysalid that contained it, most of the time, and Matthew’s whole posture changed. His shoulders loosened but were pushed back in a confident, if not slightly intimidating poise. His hands would go loose by his sides, facial muscles too. 

His body on itself would go eerily still. A facsimile of a living doll with that lopsided smirk, all lips and canines and promises. The red blindfold, once, only served to leave grown men shaking on their boots more easily. But the Devil’s unnerving blank gaze could do it just the same.

Castle could never put Matt and the Devil as the same person, they were too different in the aspects that mattered and some trivial ones too. For one, Red was left-handed, the devil was ambidextrous. Matt didn’t speak Arabic, the devil, curiously, did. Matt had a slight lisp, the devil did not.

The Devil did what he had to do with half-contained brutality, clever and strategical efficiency. Matthew was the first one to jump into the fire to save a man who’d rather spit on his corpse than lift a finger for him. 

The Devil killed and soaked himself in blood with empty eyes and blank expression that barely held back rage. Matthew was the one who’d collapse and shake for hours afterwards. 

It’s been two years since Frank saw those auburn strands of hair against the light. Two years since he heard his sweet, smooth sunshine voice and yet, the tips of his fingers go numb with the force of his clenched fist.

Curt gives him a look as he walks towards Summers with furious steps as his usual, pacifist take on conflict dissolved. Castle knows he’s here today, meeting Red, because the man wanted had planned so (and was probably fed up with his bullshit). He knows the look when it tells him to go after Matthew, specially after what he just heard.

_ You were Rawlins’ little bitch and that’s all. _

He could just walk away, even now that his fists beg to find Michael Summers obnoxious, dumbass face. Adrenaline feels like hot acid in his veins but  _ oh _ , how Frank knows how to put it to good use.

_ ‘Are you alright, sir?’  _ It’s Asset’s - no, Murdock’s - voice that comes to find Frank in his cot, divorce papers in hand. He had them for two months before his deploying but it’s the first time he actually takes a look at them.

_ ‘Just Frank, yeah? Don’t need to call me that every time’  _ he finds himself trying to sound comforting. There’re too many ghosts on the kid’s eyes already, Frank doesn’t need to be another one giving him any grief.

_ ‘Yes, Frank’ _ Murdock’s face twists a funny thing. His clueless behavior is enough to tell the Lieutenant he’s not used to it. But he sits down on Billy’s cot anyway, body angled towards Frank’s.  _ ‘You sound... upset, si- Frank’  _

_ ‘Yeah’ _ a heavy sigh followed.

_ ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Frank?’  _ body language usually told him a lot, even with a man as hard to hear as Red. The worry lines in his mouth, jaw working, fists tightened, thin muscles cording in wrists. He was clearly new to the whole worrying concept. 

_ ‘Don’t you worry, yeah? I’ll be just fine, Murdock’  _ he tries to sound comforting. Matthew smiles a small thing, and Frank thinks of sunlight and summer.

_ ‘That was a lie, sir’  _ it’s his sassy, careful reply and Frank chuckles. 

_ ‘Yes it was, Red’  _ the man ( _ such a young, young thing but with so much behind those sad eyes)  _ graces him with a chuckle and something eases off of Frank’s chest. It hadn’t gone past him how Murdock was always tense.

_ ‘Is it something to do with the papers in your hands, si- Frank?’  _

_ ‘Yes’ _ he soon realizes it’s impossible for him to know what’s on them  _ ‘it’s, uh.. divorce papers’ _

_ ‘Oh’  _ Murdock went pensive, an understanding yet not overall sympathetic face. Sorry for his pain, unknowing of how that must feel. It was something he had seen in Maria’s face when he talked about the bombs and the gunfire and how it felt when it just stopped.  _ ‘What is it like, sir?’  _

Clearly would take a while to break him out of the  _ sir _ thing. ‘ _ What is?’ _

_ ‘Dating. Marrying. Relationships and... family’  _ he had sounded so eager then, so willing, so  _ hopeful.  _ It had damn near broken his heart.

_ ‘How long have you been here, Matt?’  _

Murdock had answered him in a whisper.

_ ‘It feels like my whole life’ _

The decision is made for him by his own body, muscles tensing and working before he could process the impact from his own footsteps. He barely manages to find him, only seeing the blur of his shadow as he turned left and went up the stairs.

His whole body feels foreigner for a second. Heart stuck to the days Matthew was his to hold, mind conscious of the long two years of silence he imposed on them like a deer is of an arrow stuck in it’s muscles, damaging it’s organs. A death sentence that drags on slowly and painfully, and Frank was aware of it every step of the way.

_ ‘Can I hold you?’ _

_ ‘Yes... yes please, Frank’ _

_ ‘It’s cold. Let me warm you up’ _

__

Auburn hair is the first thing he sees as he steps out of the building. Longer than it had been, years ago, but trimmed the same way. Frank remembers Matt mentioning he trimmed his own hair since he was a teen, always the same way, the same length, every three months.

His alabaster skin is next, a portion of his nape in sight, freckles the same configuration he remembered and some new ones too. Sprinkling his skin like stars in a night sky. 

His skin, once, had been sun kissed. Caramel toned. Two years away from the desert was enough for it to return to it’s normal color. Snow freckled over by specks of tender latte-toned splatters. 

Matthew’s head tilts as soon as Frank steps closer and the marine can see his eyes widen behind red-tinted shades. It reminds him of a red blindfold worn into combat more times than one could count. Covering his disability not from their enemies but from the man who had bred him into war. Sharpened him like a spear, conditioned him like a dog and treated him like nothing more than one. Carving into his flesh and bone and leaving him a bleeding mess.

Here, standing so much closer than he’d dare to dream days before, Frank can’t find any words in him.

It had been a last grasp at normality and peace that Frank knew would never justify what he did. A mind overruled by sounds and experiences that he should have left behind in a sand covered place, but couldn’t. Memory broken from a round to the head, migraines assaulting his everyday life. 

And Maria. 

Since before marrying her, Maria had been a safe place away from the shit, mud, blood and bullets he buried himself in willingly during his tours. And he had grasped at what they once meant for each other like a terrified kid grasping at comfort. 

And still, Matthew had looked so empty and broken-hearted at the same time. Body assuming combat position while his eyes screamed hurt and disbelief and so much  _ sadness. _

He had ended something so beautiful and precious. A fool.

_ ‘If you could be anywhere but here. Anywhere... where would you be?’ _

_ ‘Anywhere?’ _

_ ‘Yes’ _

__

“Red” his voice is weak and it carries little confidence, but it’s all he can give of himself. Matty did always find a way to leave his knees unsteady, breathless and disorientated. His eyes can’t help travelling his figure, as limber and at ready as always. 

“Lieutenant Castle” the younger one’s voice is nothing more than whisper too. And Frank frowns slightly. He does the deserve the title, he had it coming after what he did. Staring down at the chasm he cracked between them and it’s more than enough for him to feel the weight of the bottomless hole in his chest.

He had felt himself so justified, years ago. Now Matthew’s left hand shakes nonstop, his eyes covered from him, shoulders squared back as if facing a threat and it was all just  _ wrong.  _

Frank has no doubts this is his fault.

Matthew probably notices his gaze, for his left hand soon finds shelter inside the left pocket of his khaki parka. For a second, he turns his head away, only to finally angle his body towards Frank’s. He was never one to back from a challenge or a conflict. Even if it broke him to pieces.

“How... how you been, Red?” it sounds lame to his own ears and he cringes, but it all Castle wants to know. Wants to hear Matty’s been fine.

_ Do you have nightmares about it? The building, the IED, the sandstorm, the ambush? Do you wake up panting, crying and confused? Do you feel it, this thing creeping and echoing around you, this loneliness? _

_ Do you still cry when someone is kind to you? Do you still struggle to give them your name, your real name, and not the one Rawlins gave to you? Do you still treat your body like everyone else’s shield and your own penance?  _

_ Do you still curl around yourself when they scream at you? A kid so conditioned to violence, so used to punishment. _

Frank would know the answers, should he look close enough. But he hesitates and doesn’t search for it. 

“I’ve been... good, I-” he recoils slightly, frowning. Matthew is a great actor but he had always been a shit liar. Specially when he tried to lie to him. So he evades. “And you?”

Frank inhales sharply, can feel his own heartbeat as it hammers against his ribs. “I... Matty” the nickname makes Matt physically recoil from him, whole body tensing with this one step backwards. He sways slightly to the right, any sense of balance staggering for a split second, skin turning pale. 

_ Oh sweetheart, I’m so sorry. _

“Red” it’s what he says instead “I just... I’m sorry” 

It’s more a rasp than a voice, deepening into a hoarse rumble. Matt inhales sharply, big eyes round and lost behind his shades, lips twitching. A memory of him smiling for the first time, a shy little thing that blossomed like a flower, ravages his mind. 

“Big IF!” It’s Watson’s voice that makes any frail connection on that moment sever, Matthew taking a physical step back from the unwelcome intrusion. “Thought you’d never sit with us mere mortals, how you doing?” 

Matthew is overwhelmed. Castle can recognize the telling signs when he makes himself smaller, retreating from the two of them.

“Red-” 

“I need to go” Matt’s voice falters and Frank’s heart squeezes painfully in his chest, lungs hurting. Expanding too much to possibly fit inside his thorax. Matthew steps away and raises a hand the second a taxi appears, shaking hand kept away in the pocket of his parka. 

He turns his head to Frank one last time before getting inside the taxi, shaking lips in pale skin. 

An itch, like a phantom pain of a lost limb, spreads through his fingers. A touch he didn’t land, a caress he couldn’t give. The shadow sensation of holding him a lifetime ago.

_ ‘You’re good’ _ he whispered into his ear. Gunner and Elektra had just died and they had just killed over thirty men. Matthew’s hand shaking, covered in blood, struggling against the hold, convulsing with the force of his silent sobs, Frank holding on to dear life to the bleeding wound on his man’s neck at the same time he tried to hug him close  _ ‘You’re so good, Matty’  _

_ ‘Please’  _ his voice pleaded, begged, grieving and breaking. Surrounded by the death they brought in their hands. 

Frank watches as the taxi drives away, knowing he can’t comfort him this time.

Castle saw him in the field for the first time three weeks after they first landed in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

They had been doing short recon missions every night for two weeks on a sensitive target, finding mostly the comes and goings of their target’s people, the cogs on his little system. In the middle of the third week, intelligence came about the man. 

Vital intelligence (which was, mostly, never shared with them). The words  _ sensitive  _ and  _ high-value _ was all they got from Major Schoonover and Agent Orange, and it was all they needed to say to know they’d do the job.

Matthew was, at that point, still a foreigner for most. He already talked a bit more comfortably with Frank and Bill, and was overcoming his awkwardness regarding Curtis and Gunner. He was mostly quiet when in the other’s company, and he was given individual tasks frequently by Rawlins.

He had, two days before, arrived with a bleeding calf and bruised ribs, a memory stick and a camera memory card held in hands of bloodied knuckles. Which was enough to tell Frank where the ‘last minute intelligence’ came from.

“The target is to be neutralized by Castle’s team. Russo, your team is on stake out duty. Asset, you will be following Castle’s orders. Castle, you are to send Asset for reconnaissance first. If he judges he can neutralize the target with no unnecessary attention, be smart and use him. Otherwise, coordinate your man and infiltrate. Target is to be taken alive for interrogation. Russo, your team remains after Castle’s team heads back to base. I don’t want anyone, be it a man, a woman, a kid or a dog to give word of this operation. Questions?”

“No, sir”

“Start the preparations, then”

“We leave in 20 minutes” Schoonover warns as the men in the room immediately head for their own preparations. Frank directing his men as Bill did the same with his.

When turning to Matt, he softens his stance but not his tone.

“I don’t know about your routine, but I expect you prepared and heading to the Humvee in 15, yes?”

“Yes, sir” Frank is amazed by the speed and feline grace of Matthew as he dodges every single men, heading towards his own, separated cot in a corner. 

Unlike them, he was never pressured to use body armor. No Kevlar, no helmet, no vest. Instead, he wore tight fitting cargo pants, holsters holding some carefully hidden knives and weapons. A black, turtle neck long-sleeved shirt and something similar to a coat, tied up in the front. Gloves. Also black. The red blindfold, however, clashed with the rest of it. A splash of blood red in perfect skin.

“Well, ain’t that calling a little bit of attention?” asks Bill, amused smile in place accompanying genuine curiosity. 

“It would, sir”

“Billy”

“It would, Billy” Matt smiles “Should they see me coming” Bill chuckles.

“I like the confidence” Billy checked his ammo, amused smile still directed to Red “And if they do see you coming?”

“Intimidation, Bill” Frank chimes in, checking on his own ammo, his ka-bar and handgun. Matthew smiles and nods small, a tilt of his head, a show of agreement. “You see a black shadow with blood red in his eyes.  _ Prophet still, if bird or devil”  _ he quoted, amused “ _ and his eyes have all the seeing of a demon’s that is dreaming” _

“What’s.. what’s that?”

“Allan Poe”

“You’re shitting me”

“Shit you not”

“You read a  _ poem?” _

“Ha ha. Bill, you’re so funny man”

“All by yourself? I’m impressed. Didn’t know you could read” Matt chuckled by their side, putting his gloves in one fluid, feline-like motion. Bill raised his eyebrows as the man smiled a wicked, quiet thing, heading towards the Humvee. 7 minutes.

Huh. Frank was impressed. And maybe the slightest bit turned on.

He ignores it, for he had a job to do. 

Matthew had seemed so unafraid at the time. Wicked, determined smiles in everything but the missions that involved killing. So young and yet so fearless - or so he had thought at the time. When he still wasn’t aware of how he abhorred killing, how it left him in shambles. Web cracks spreading miles in his mind every time  _ he  _ told him to do it.

At one point in his life, Frank believed one made a choice to fight and to kill. He believed there was no such thing as forcing someone onto those two things. It was a choice, and one Castle made everyday he got up to work. Matthew broke that conception. And Rawlins showed him how truly rotten people could be.

At the time, already inside of the vehicle with Matt, Watson, Riviera and Daniels, the thought could have never crossed his mind. 

Russo’s team is there first and Frank nods towards Matthew as soon as they settle in too. Half the team on either side of a building that got them covered as he did his own reconnaissance. They got the green light from Billy and Matthew disappeared from his side like a shadow.

“Oh,  _ Jesus” _ was Daniel’s mutter when she finally spotted him again, climbing a high wall as if it was nothing more than a walk in the park and then disappearing from view once more. 

It took Murdock 10 minutes to round the perimeter and the target’s hide out. Billy is the one to update them through the comms, being the only one able to follow him with his Steiner’s.

_ “Raven, this is Blackbird. Hummingbird is heading back to the nest. 20 feet away and approaching” _

“Copy. You kept your eyes on ‘im, Bill?”

“ _ Sure did, Lieutenant. Your new boy is a fucking human-sized grasshopper”  _ Frank snorted, shaking his head as he watched it through the scope of his rifle. Curt was on Bill’s team tonight, and he missed the assurance of someone he worked so well with. But he had a feeling Red would be a great addition.

He comes back less than three minutes later, not even winded. 

“No surveillance cameras. Three armed men at the building left of the target, 2 at the right, one in front of target's location. There is a blind spot in the back, no surveillance or armed personnel. The target's family is asleep in a room in the other side of the house. I can infiltrate in the back, incapacitate and neutralize while the team deals with the outside forces. 12 minutes tops until conclusion of the task, sir, what should I do?” 

Frank blinked. 

“Give them hell”

Frank had watched probably the most swift and skilled fighter he had ever had the pleasure of serving with that day. In five minutes, he had the target bound in the convoy and still had found the time to help the team with a surprise attack. In fourteen minutes they warned base they’d be heading back and that the mission was complete. 

He remembers looking at Murdock as he took off the blood red blindfold, skin pristine and almost no hair out of place.

“Well that was hell alright, Devil” 

Matt had tilted his head and then smiled a small, shy but assured thing towards Castle. He wonders today if that’s when he first fell for him. 

The marine is unable to keep his thoughts to himself for much longer, and finds himself calling Curtis four days later. His mind played a loop of Matty’s beautiful, auburn hair in the light. It also kept reminding him of him recoiling away, curling around himself, when Frank called him by his nickname. 

Like it had been a physical blow to his face. Hurting him. As if he couldn’t bear what it did to him. 

It reminded him, vaguely, of when he had first hugged the younger man. He had held him tight against his chest and Matthew had  _ whimpered.  _ Overwhelmed at the human touch, the gentleness, the intimacy. The warm connection of skin to skin that, gone without for long enough, made you feel like nothing less than a amorphic mass drowning in the limbo. 

“Curt”

“Frank, my man. What are you up to?”

“Ah, nothing much. Just drove Lisa to her clarinet classes”

“Ow man, she still into that?”

“Can’t listen to another note, Curt. Not another goddamn one. Swear she might have busted by eardrums” Curtis chuckled at his misery, amused.

“So...” Frank should’ve known he wouldn’t need to bring it up. “How was it?” 

He doesn’t bother asking what the corpsman’s referring to.

“Did you... hm...” Frank cleared his throat “Keep in touch with him? All this time?”

“Well, someone had to. And it clearly wasn’t gonna be you” Castle sighs heavily at the other end of the phone, resting back against the couch. “And you bet your ass I did. Matt’s a good kid, a good man”

“He is”

“And he’s been through too much”

“Yeah, I know. I know...” Curt knows how to prod at his guilt and make it hurt. And it’s part of why Frank was friends with the guy. He never put up with his bullshit.

“So what the  _ hell  _ took you so long?” Castle sighs even heavier, bringing a rough hand to cover his eyes, head thrown back over the backrest. 

What did take him so long? Frank had talked to Curt about Matthew for the last time over a year and a half ago, and then he went with the motions. Recoiling at every memory or mention of the man he loved so goddamn much. Maria had broken things between them after two months of trying, when he came back from Kandahar. 

_ ‘You broke him, you come back and you fix him!’ _

_ ‘I can’t’ _

_ ‘Yes, you can- I can’t do this man, it breaks my damn heart hearing him talk like they’re still alive, not knowing where the hell he is, like he’s still 15 and-... Goddamn it. Goddamn you, Castle’  _

_ ‘I can’t’  _ voice merely a whisper, tears rolling from his eyes. 

“If I’m being honest, I guess I was scared” he rasps out, tone deep and weak. Strangled by his own guilt, his own pain. He tries to clear his throat once more. 

Recalls Matty’s broken tone, his trembling voice, when they came back to a world they didn’t know how to love, anymore. A world Matt didn’t even remember living in. And Frank left him. Alone, to deal with all the new things, all the hurt, the trauma, the pain.

_ ‘I’m so stupid...’ _

_ ‘Red...’ _

_ ‘I’m so stupid, I actually thought-‘ _

__

Red never did finish his sentence, but his eyes had told Frank everything in one glance. It hurt too much to leave and it hurt more to stay, so he had walked away. In the middle of their best friends’ funerals. He walked away and he didn’t look back.

(He did. He did look back. When he was in the car by Maria’s side, he looked once. And it broke his heart and took away his breath to see Matty looking so small and lost. To see his whole body shake for a moment, before it went still and settled back in the same rest position of a soldier. Shoulders back, chin up, lips lax in disbelief and hurt)

“I guess I hoped things would go back to normal. I- I needed them to. Needed them to be exactly how they were before I left- before everything went to shit. 

_ ‘I’d like to meet your kids someday. Can I?’ _

_ ‘Course you can, sweetheart. I’d love you to’ _

__

“I guess, every time I looked at him I remembered-.. I remembered the shit that happened, the shit we went through-“

_ ‘Oh my- no no no’ _

_ ‘Matty, calm down. Calm down’ _

_ ‘I killed them... all of- they’re dead, they’re dead...’ _

_ ‘You’re good. You’re good, Matty. I promise, I promise’ _

__

“Couldn’t look at him and not think of the pain, the shit we did for that son of a bitch”

Curt was silent on the other side. 

“He turned us into mercenaries, Curt. And he... he torn Matty to pieces. Made him keep going when he just... when he just couldn’t anymore”

“And then you left” Curt mutters back. No accusations on his tone. Nothing but sad resignation and cold, hard facts. 

“And then I left” Frank whispers in agreement. Because he did. 

_ ‘If you could be anywhere but here. Anywhere... where would you be?’ _

_ ‘Anywhere?’ _

_ ‘Yes’ _

_ ‘Somewhere far away from the sand. Somewhere we could be together’ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been putting together a playlist of sorts. Just some songs I really liked and thought about when writing the chapters. 
> 
> 01 - Berlin, RY X  
> 02 - Devil that I know, Jacob Banks  
> 03 - Goodbye, Apparat  
> 04 - To be alone with you, Sufjan Stevens 
> 
> I love indie folk you guys, don't judge me <3 I'll be posting with the songs for each chapter for now on, should you guys want to check it all out. Next chapter will probably be posted tomorrow too, see you then <3


	5. And sank no more

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matthew looses time after talking to Frank and ends up visiting two friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, you guys. I have been a bit sick these few days.   
> This chapter is Matty's point of view of what happened after meeting Frank and talking to him. Claire makes her first and maybe last appearance in this story (but who knows).  
> I liked developing a bit more of Matt's mental issues in this one. And the Devil finally talks!

> _ Long had I laid thus, craving death, _
> 
> _ when quietly the earth beneath _
> 
> _ gave way, and inch by inch, so great _
> 
> _ At last had grown the crushing weight, _
> 
> _ Into the earth I sank till I _
> 
> _ Full six feet under ground did lie, _
> 
> _ and sank no more,- there is no weight _
> 
> _ can follow here, however great. _
> 
> _ \- Renascence, Edna St. Vincent Millay _

__

“Matt?”

He recognizes the voice as it slips through the cracks of the thick, muddling fog. It doesn’t register on his mind, however. Cotton filling up his empty, aching skull and a hive of bees buzzing in his ears.

He felt oddly out of his own body, skin feeling too numb to be anything but paper or plastic. Not his own. His blinking was slow and uncoordinated. The voice feeling too far away for it to do any good in bringing him back from where he slipped away from his flesh and bone. 

There’s heat and skin in his right hand. 

Someone’s holding his hand. Who could be holding his hand? Foggy doesn’t do it too much. Curtis likes warm hugs and clapping his back... who holds his hand?

_ Citrus smelling shampoo, store bought, coconut scented hand cream, coffee with a splash of milk, brushed her teeth, hand sanitizer, sterile, just back from work, probably a doctor or a nurse- _

Oh. Claire. The nurse. The nurse that had found him that night, years ago, walking around in bare feet, unaware of where he was, asking for his commander, talking in Pashto. 

Matt doesn’t remember heading to her flat or taking a cab. He didn’t remember much of anything actually, and it didn’t exactly surprise him. The last ten to twelve years of his life had been strenuous not only to his body but to his mind. It had left his skin and bones scarred and his mind broken to shambles. 

The time loss happened often since Rawlins found him in Iraq. Shooting Stick in the chest and dragging Matthew for interrogation.

Until he decided he’d be of use to him. And then, Matt got acquainted with hell. 

_ I’m sorry. _

One thing he hadn’t considered was the possibility of Frank waltzing his way into Matthew’s life once more. His voice was an echo now, the rumbling of the baritone always a gentle caress in his oversensitive ears. 

On earlier days, he had hoped desperately that it would be the case. A spark of it that would keep him going through the motions. A hope that got crushed one too many times, until it faded into an afterthought, and, finally, into nothing. 

And in the end, Frank had been one phone call away. All it took was Curt getting fed up with their two-year-long radio silence and setting them up to meet. Cohabiting the same space for an hour after long years of unmeasurable distance. Two of the most difficult of Matt’s life.

_ Red? _

He had hoped so much, for so long. At the same time, convinced that there was no way Frank would leave such a beautiful family for a broken toy like Murdock. Like  _ asset.  _ Someone with no identity or funny stories of nostalgic childhood memories. A mind split in half, skin with a history of pain and abuse and so unknown to relationships and social situations. 

Frank was a soldier, of course. They found kinship in that, for they had been brothers in arms. Even when they danced around each other for months. And even when they sneaked to the dark corners and the empty spaces so they could hold onto one another and kiss and talk in whispered tones with roaming hands and matching heartbeats.

Yes, Castle was a soldier. But not like Matt. Not really. 

Being a soldier was Frank’s work. He knew to separate it from his daily life, even if it bled into it more often than not. He could still find himself coming back to family, coffee shops and traffic. Schools and mortgage. 

Matthew had been trained and conditioned for too long and too hard for him to be anything else than a weapon at all times. Always highly aware of his surroundings. Picking people apart to determine the threats and the useful allies, the ones who could take care of themselves an the ones that would need Matt’s protection. The ones he could work with, the ones he could manipulate. Too keyed up, body always ready to jump at a moments notice.

He had his wants and wills beaten out of him for a long time, too. And then they tried to rid him of all his humanity when Rawlins captured him and that’s when the Devil slowly started taking shape.

Matt never acknowledged it. The missing chunks of memory from some of his missions. Coming to awareness, not knowing where he is and how he got there. Something that bled into the civilian life he patched for himself. 

He never acknowledged the voice he could hear sometimes. How he’d let himself go and give way to the ticking presence in the back of his head and come back to himself minutes, hours,  _ days  _ later with no knowledge of what happened or what  _ It  _ did.

_ ‘Have you heard of DID, asset?’  _ Elektra had asked once, taunting him with a obnoxious smile on her face. Matt had been shaking on a corner, hands feeling tacky with drying up blood and glass shards. Skin itching like it was covered in sand, even if Matthew knew it wasn’t.  _ ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder’ _

_ ‘Leave me alone, Elektra’ _

_ ‘Oh, it’s Elektra now, huh? Not ma’am?’  _ Matt could tell she was trying to annoy him into action or reaction but he had been breaking and all he wanted was the quiet. 

He waved her presence away. She wasn’t there anyway. She had been dead for 3 months.

“Matt? It’s Claire, remember? You’re in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. It’s 7:30 p.m. Tell me your name, alright,  _ cariño?” _

Name.  _ What is your name? _

Matt shook his head absently, fingers jumping by his side. 

“I’m... fine, Claire” 

| _ Liar, liar, Matthew| _

Matt jumped, a forced exhale leaving his lungs. It leaves him feeling as if he was squeezed out of air, skin suddenly tightening up against his bones, stomach revolting. The headache just got stronger, pulsing like another heartbeat right at the back of his head.

It wasn’t often It talked to him. He was usually a quiet presence in the back of his mind. Silently observing, judging. 

“Matt. You’ve gone really pale. Come inside and sit, alright?”

“No,  _ stop -  _ Claire, I..”

“I want to hear you say it, then. Come on,  _ cariño,  _ we’ve done this before, yeah?”

“My name... is Matt Murdock”

_ |Asset, freak, Devil. Good boys don’t lie| _

_ Shut up. _

“I’m twenty-seven years old, it’s...” 

_ What days is it? How did I get here? For how long did you take over? _

_ |Who said I did?| _

_ Don’t lie to me. _

“It’s June. 7:30 p.m. I’m in Hell’s Kitchen, New York” oh,  _ God,  _ his head was killing him. Throbbing hard enough that it chased the overwhelming numbness away. He groans in discomfort, fingertips clumsy as he rubs his right temple. An unexplainable source of heat in his nape makes him shudder slightly. It happens sometimes and it always feels like the Devil crawling under his skin.

“That’s it. Ok. Alright... come inside, you’re freezing” 

Rain. His skin is suddenly over sensitized by the scant drops coming in contact with the bare skin. They splash against the waiting cells, lightening up his nerve endings like lightning injected in his veins. 

He’s not wearing his parka, as he had been in Curt’s group session. And it hadn’t been raining either. 

He was, however, wearing pajama pants and a loose Columbia hoodie. Beaten up sneakers on his feet. Which smelled of dog fur and dirt, for some reason.

Matt refrains from asking the day as he walks inside the nurse’s loft. He doesn’t want Claire to worry too much, as he accepts the offer to seat on her couch, hugging himself tightly as she starts making coffee. The smell of it is grounding, hints of almond in the grounded beans. It’s not the cheap, store-brand coffee Matthew usually buys for himself.

“It’s Saturday, the 21st” he should stop underestimating the nurse, her knowing tone taking Matt’s mind away from the sweet aroma of coffee beans and warm milk. She sees right through him, bringing him the coffee cup with more milk and sugar in it than he’d usually take. He’s probably a bit hypoglycemic and Claire most likely noticed.

He had lost almost a whole day. If he dissociated, he probably didn’t eat anything. If he s _ witched,  _ the Devil would have made sure to eat. Unless he was too busy.

Since Matthew’s hands are clean, he doesn’t linger on the last one.

_ |I told you, Matthew| _

_ Stop talking to me. _

_ |Now, that’s just rude. No one likes a rude boy| _

“What is the last you remember?”

Getting off the taxi. Crossing the street. Loud cars. A woman coming back home after giving birth. A couple of teenagers laughing loudly. Sirens far away. The smell of pizza and tar and concrete and carbon dioxide. The taste of it on his tongue.

Getting home. A shower. He cried. Why was he crying?

“Yesterday night” it’s a whispered response and he doesn’t care much to hide whatever expression twists in his face. Claire would see right through him anyway. “I got home and I took a shower”

“Nothing after that?” 

_ Crying, gasping, hyperventilating. _

_ Asking why. Why now. Why talk to him with the same baritone voice that once whispered in his ears and made him smile?  _

_ Scratching at bare skin, a disorientating pain in the back of his head.  _

_ “ _ No” It’s a lie. Claire knows. Matt is aware that she does. His lungs feel too big for his ribs and his heart too small for his build and Matt is overall a dysfunctional, faulty device. Ticking away into collapse.

The nurse sighs, getting up from her spot on the ratty armchair, knees creaking as she does. Probably came back from being on-call at the hospital. Metro-general, he recalls. She motions for Murdock to scoot over, sitting close to him this time, thighs touching in comforting warmth.

“What triggered it, Matt?” 

_ I-... Matty. _

_ (No, don’t you dare call me that. Don’t you dare make me feel like the last two years were nothing. That you could just waltz in and crush any progress I made in moving on. That you can just call me that and have me falling into your arms like not a day has passed -) _

It’s not what Frank was doing and Murdock knew that, somewhere in his brain. Behind the bitter blinding pain and the nauseous twisting of his insides, Matthew knew Frank had been feeling as awkward as he was. He could always tell those things, even as distracted as he had been.

And he had genuinely cared for what Matthew had to say about how he’d been. Could feel the eagerness on his posture, the thrumming underneath his skin. The skin Matt once traced, hugged, kissed.

A raspy whisper leaves him before he can think better of it. “I saw someone” he clears his throat, letting the warmth of his friend spread through him and his tongue loosens. “Someone I hadn’t seen or talked to in a long time”

“Someone from... your fighting days?”

“Lieutenant Frank Castle” his voice is but a wisp of air, shredding into his throat before it makes much sense. Claire nods, however. Silent as she studies him and the information he disclosed.

She can most likely notice the respect in his tone. And not in the way he had talked of Riviera or Daniels once, or even Gunner. Not the same fond way he spoke of Bill, Elektra and Curt. 

“Was he important to you?” it’s phrased as a question, but Matthew knows she’s only confirming what she saw. He swallows painfully with a throat that feels too dry and fingers that won’t stop trembling against the cool porcelain of his coffee cup. 

“He was...”  _ everything that ever mattered. _

The redhead chokes on his words, swallowing convulsively as he goes silent. There  _ are no words.  _ Frank had been the first ray of hope and life he whiffed in between dunes and ghost cities and punishing hands. He had been love and friendship and partnership. He had been hope that Matthew was something beyond what they made of him, that he could become his own person and leave the hands of William Rawlins. 

Frank had been cool, gentle rain after a whole life of searing heat and punishing overexposure. 

“Can I hug you?” she always asks, for some reason. Matt doesn’t know why but he appreciates it. Someone taking his wishes into account. 

_ ‘I now pronounce you - drums please, Curt -’  _ Billy had a shit eating grin on his face, his ka-bar in hand after he made Matt kneel like a squire in a naming ceremony. ‘ _ Hummingbird! Welcome to the nest, Mittens’ _

_ ‘You couldn’t come up with another name, could you?’  _ asked Frank, shaking his head with an amused smile as Matt stood up from the ground. He could feel his gaze, and so he returned it, smiling at the Lieutenant.

He heard Frank’s heart jump in his chest.

_ ‘Well. We are all black birds, aren’t we? We ran out of names. Besides, he’s as fast as one’  _ Frank shrugged, he couldn’t argue with the facts.

‘ _ Can I hug you, big boy?’  _ asked Billy, opening, welcoming arms and big smile. Matt lets him.  _ ‘We got your back, Mittens. We got ya’ _

__

He finally nods to Claire and she hugs him carefully. Not too much pressure, so Matthew won’t feel trapped. Not too light as to be unable to ground him or comfort.

“What happened? Between you two” Matt doesn’t have a clue on how to provide context. How to explain that they had been through  _ so much,  _ had done and seen and experienced all the darkest parts of war. Only to find out it had been for nothing.

That the whole operation was funded by the same heroin they had tried to confiscate. That they had been covering their own tracks instead of getting real, necessary intelligence. That their dead’s bodies were being sent home stuffed full of drugs. 

The context matters, he knows. But there’s only so much he can find the strength to share, and Kandahar is not one of the things he wishes to.

“He left” Matt whispers instead “Wanted another chance with his wife before they signed the divorce for good”

“Oh,  _ cariño...  _ You were together?” 

“As much as we could”  _ thighs pressed together in mission debriefing or strategy planning. Visiting each other’s cots, fingers lacing together, big grins as they sparred, sneaking into the showers, stealing kisses in the dark and roaming hands on each other’s warm skins. Pulling each other away from danger, working so well together that others started calling them soulmates as a joke. They had no idea. _

_ “ _ What are you going to do?” she prods, clearly trying to get him to think about it somewhere he had support. Somewhere he didn’t need to figure things out on his own and inevitably crash. 

“I don’t know, Claire... He was the first. The only one”

“What about the woman you told me about? The one with the funny name”

“Elektra. Nothing ever happened between us. She was volatile. Manipulative. And then...” 

And then, he found out Stick was alive and was her mentor, just like he had been his. That he could have taken him off of Rawlins hands any time in the last ten years but decided not to. Only to throw Elektra at him to try and recruit him back to the Chaste. 

_ “ _ I found out she lied”

“About?”

“She was like me. The same guy who trained me, trained her” he explains, a wistful whisper of voice leaving his uncooperative lips. “I was her mission”

Matthew leaves it at that. Not much he can say beyond those facts. She is dead, and her death had hurt a lot more than he thought it would, back then. But still, the pain of her betrayal was still bone-deep into him. All her memories tainted with the bittersweet truth.

“She left you alone? After you found out, I mean” 

He remembers blood dripping in sand, being absorbed into the disconnected, amorphic grains. Swallowed away like everything that tried to change that place. A blade stuck to the taut, scarred belly of a warrior like Matthew. A whisper of his name in confusion as she fell, a smile and an apology when she caressed his face.

_ Stick was wrong. You’re not soft. You have a light. Right there. _

Gurgling in blood, fingertips touching his chest as a grenade went off a few feet away. Men screaming and no one left to miss her when her heart finally stopped. No one but Matthew, who barely knew her.

“In a way”

She stopped showing up. At the beginning, right after they died, they’d appear constantly. Like they never left. Matthew’s mind could always conjure them as perfectly as his eidetic memory had pictured them, the creaks of old fractures, the uneven heat distribution of Elektra’s scars, the creaking of Billy’s bad shoulder. The scent of their soaps and shampoos and the tone of their voices. 

So good, in fact. That he had thought he had gone mad. Spent days unsure of what was real and what wasn’t. 

“Are you going to try and talk to him again?” Claire’s voice is a soothing balm over his wounds, taking his mind away of too many unpleasant memories.

“I don’t know if I can” a pathetic whisper is all he can muster. Matt tries not to think of Stick’s voice. Or Rawlins.

“Was he good to you? For you?” 

“Hm” Matt sighs, huddles a bit closer to Claire’s warm skin. She had an arm around his back then. “Better than I could have ever hoped for”

“Even now? That you know better?” He understands it, although a part of him bristles at the tone. Like Matthew’s distance to real-world relationships and real-world daily living made him  _ naïve  _ somehow. 

He doesn’t dwell on the feeling, as much as a part of him wants to recoil from her words. He understands that she’s not talking about that, specifically, but about his poor reference in people. Once upon a time, nice would be someone who didn’t beat him half to death every time he messed something up. Good would be someone who gave him food even when he hadn’t earned it. 

Matt understood his circumstances better, now. Even if he didn’t feel them. 

The therapists, the CIA and Homeland Security had called him a victim, and Matt only ever felt the blood in his hands when they said so.

“Yes. Even now” 

Claire doesn’t make him talk any longer when she notices how exhausted he was. She gives him something to eat and then lets him shower and put the extremely oversized clothes of her boyfriend, Luke. He doesn’t mention how he can smell him in them. How he can tell he smells more like Matt than he smells like her. A mutate.

She calls Cage to warn him that a friend will be sleeping in the guest room. Matthew listens to them talk quietly when he gets home, cuddling to each other for an hour before he opens the window and disappears into the night. 

It’s late, but he catches a bus anyway. It drops him off in Astoria and he makes the walk towards the graveyard. 

Once, Billy was the friend he’d always go to when he had doubts about Frank or their relationship. When he didn’t know how to act or what to say or how to solve an issue. Today, maybe in instinct, he does the same. Because he’s not sure he’d be able to really talk to anyone else about it.

Bill had been the closest thing to a platonic soulmate he had ever had. They had understood each other so easily. Two orphans trying to fit somewhere they’re not sure they can fit. Cutting and molding pieces of themselves so maybe, just maybe, they will feel a little better about it. Untrusting of kind words and weary of helping hands.

He sits by his grave today. No flowers, no black bows.

“Sorry I didn’t bring you any, today” Matt mutters. It doesn’t feel weird to talk to him out loud, at this hour of the night. There is only the dead around him to listen, and Matthew has nothing to hide from them. “Not that you’d care. You’d probably tell me to bring you chocolate. I guess they’d be wasted” 

A sharp breeze makes him shiver. 

“Remember when you told me about the man from the group home? The one who hurt your shoulder?”

Matt waits for a response out of habit. But it’s been over a year since he last hallucinated with his dead best friend, and the cold breeze and the whistling grass is all that answers him back.

“Five months after you... after you were gone, I tracked him down, Bill. I don’t know why I never told you. I don’t know what happened, but I woke up with busted knuckles and a bruise in my temple”

_ |I could have told you, should you have asked. But you decided to hide, didn’t you, Matty? Isn’t that what you always do?| _

He ignores it.  _ Him.  _

“The first thing I did was dial Frank’s number. Guess I thought I’d ask him for help or something. ‘cause I didn’t want to believe I had killed someone here, away from the war”

He gets closer to the gravestone, pale fingers reaching for the humid grass and weaving around it’s thin blades. 

“It turns out I didn’t. But he did spend a month eating through a straw”

Matt doesn’t know why he’s talking about this now, of all times. Maybe it’s the Devil’s overwhelming presence. It had been years since he last heard his voice properly. Blurring in civilian life like muddy waters. 

“Frank talked to me. Yesterday. After two years” he whispers, and can almost imagine Billy’s scoff of derision. His smooth voice snorting out a  _ took you both long enough.  _ “It was short and awkward and it hurt. I thought I’d be angry, meeting him. But all I-...”

Deep breaths. His chest hurts as he tries to put his mind and body under control. 

_ |Mind over matter. Isn’t that what he told you?| _

“All I thought was that if he asked me to hold me, to kiss me, to  _ be  _ with me again, I’d have said yes in a second” it comes tumbling out of his lips, and his heart beats true to all of it. “I wouldn’t have hesitated for one s _ econd _ ”

He touches the cool surface of the gravestone. The small braille embossing in it. Stands up after a second with a silent promise of visiting them soon and walks back home in sore feet and trembling hands. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I'm a sucker for Billy calling Matt "Mittens".   
> They'll meet again next chapter, I promise, I'm sorry this is going so slow!


	6. The dying are such acrobats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frank talks to Curt and decides to call Matt. A dream brings memories back.

> _ O, the dying are such acrobats. _
> 
> _ Here you must take a boat from one day to the next, _
> 
> __
> 
> _ or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand. _
> 
> _ But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening, _
> 
> __
> 
> _ diving, recovering, balancing the air. _
> 
> _ \- Trapeze, Deborah Digges _

__

Frank makes pancakes for his kids with a heavy heart and an ever growing feeling of anxiety burning in his chest. Knowing that this is the last of them he’ll see for seven long, silent days. Where the emptiness will spread and take over every crevice of his apartment. 

It’s the end of his week, and he wonders if he’s selfish for wanting them all the time by his side when Maria has as much right as he does. His kids are what give him meaning and, out of that, he’s just a lonely, fucked-up broken soldier who still struggles with civilian life. Stuck between missing the action and having nightmares about it.

Parting with Lisa and Frankie gets harder every Monday morning. He keeps trying to find excuses to see them during Maria’s week, and she’s nice about it. Probably realized long ago, during their years together, that Frank feels better taking care of other people than himself. She knew how much he loved them, no matter how much he fucked up their marriage.

He eats his share of the pancakes, smiling at them and doing his best to keep up with their fast-tracked conversations. Lisa going on and on about her best friend, Leo, and Frankie saying something about girls being stupid because his classmate, Wendy, made fun of his freckles once.

As he gets them ready for school, he pulls Jr. aside. He knows how bullies can be nasty and he doesn’t want his kid suffering with those, but there’s only so much he can do (like talking the principal’s ears off and demanding the kid’s parents’ number). So he holds his shoulders and kneels to talk to him. Soon, he won’t have to do that. Frankie is nearing a growth spurt and it fills his heart with premature nostalgia.

“You know, there was a boy in my class once, when I was your age, he didn’t like me. Said I shouldn’t be there because I wasn’t rich like him and his as- his stupid friends”

“Did you punch him, dad?” Frank chuckles.

“I did. But you see, it didn’t solve the problem, you know why?”

“Why?” Frankie scrunches his nose and Frank can’t resist messing with his hair as he stands up.

“Because I got in trouble and I was the one who got suspended. And he didn’t stop either. You know when it stopped?”

“Hm?” he was looking down now, and he touches his kid’s chin so he’ll look at him.

“When I started ignoring them”

“Really? That’s it?” Frank chuckles and sends him to the front door of the building with his sister, helping them with their backpacks and lunch. Maria smiles and waves, and Frank nods at her. There’s a shiny ring on her finger, these days, where his used to be. He doesn’t dwell on it, not really. It, somehow, just only ever reminds him of Matty.

When he gets back inside the apartment, the silence is deafening. Castle suddenly takes notice of how every string of muscle in his body is coiled and tense. He feels wired for combat even and the adrenaline makes the tendons ripple under his skin.

His mind was one-tracked. As long as he had his kids to care about or the dogs at his job, or a sink to fix, Frank could usually keep it at bay, on bad days. Remove all the obstacles and his chest feels as if on fire, scars hurting when the skin tightens, nails digging crescent into his palms. 

Frank locks his jaw, closing his eyes. Tries to remember those breathing exercises Curt once taught him. Can’t remember how to even  _ start  _ the process of breathing normally, so he jumps away from the locked door, heading for the kitchen to get water. Something to cool him down.

He bumps into the table. The porcelain plate shattering against the floor reminds him of a bullet ripping through his shoulder, fracturing a rib before exiting through soft tissue in his back. 

The way it lies there, wrecked to pieces, reminds him of a building. 

A building people didn’t get out of. A dark place of burst pipes, and dusted silica and broken concrete. A place filled with smoke and fire and human remains and gore. A building that couldn’t stand the impact of an suicide bomber. A suicide bomber Frank couldn’t stop, because he couldn’t have been older than twelve.

A child he couldn’t put down and, for that, two soldiers lost their lives, Curt lost his leg and Matt was never the same again.

_ ‘Raven, this is blackbird, I need visual confirmation’ _

Suddenly, the air was expelled from his chest and didn’t come back. A heavy exhale that made his heartstrings and his ribcage hurt as if hammered to shambles inside his flesh. Finger falling from the trigger of the sniper rifle. 

Nausea was the next thing he felt, as his limbs went numb.  _ It took 1 second  _ for him to hesitate on pulling the trigger.  _ Two  _ for the kid to run inside.  _ Three _ for him to listen to Curt’s voice screaming in the comms.  _ And five,  _ and it all got quiet.

_ ‘Raven, do you copy? Raven, this is Blackbird, I need visual’ _

Half of the top floor from the two story building had come down. Three of their soldiers had been on the undamaged part. Four of them were right under the rubble.

_ ‘Raven, I need visual confirmation. Did the building come down on our men?’ _

Frank took his handgun and his M16, leaving the rifle behind. Watson glanced him with a weary look.

_ ‘Confirmed, sir. Hoyle, Lee, Jenkins and the Devil were inside. Daniels, Summers and Poindexter came out’ _

_ ‘Shit- mobilize rescue troop now! I need the medical. Gunner, I need base. Get me contact with base-‘ _

_ ‘Sir, this is Daniels. Lieutenant Castle is approaching the building with Watson and Gunner, sir’ _

_ ‘Frank, wait for the rescue troops! Frankie!’ _

Billy had left his own position, getting inside the building with them. They found Jenkins first, or half of him. Curt, they found soon after, unconscious and with half of his right leg missing. They couldn’t find Lee, just parts of him. Kid had been the closest to the blast. 

And then, they found Matt crawling out of a pile of dust, concrete and rocks. Unable to breathe, choking in the silica and the smoke and maybe a punctured lung. Head soaked in blood and body stained with it and soot, too. Frank remembers sighting the glint of a metal sticking out of his belly before Matt passed out.

The phone had been ringing for minutes when he finally comes to himself. Stepping around the shards of porcelain in the ground and fumbling for his phone. A headache is building slowly at the sides of his head when he catches the name in the screen.

_ “ _ Curt” he greets, sighing.

 _ “Hey, Frank. Look, have you seen Matt again? After Friday?” _ Frank frowns as he finds himself a sit in the couch.

“Just saw him that day, Curt”

“Shit, man...” Frank’s chest is suddenly burning again, heart skipping a beat. 

“What happened?” he can’t exactly keep the urgency from his voice, too breathless for it anyway. The fear of something happening to Red, even after their time apart, is as strong as it had ever been. Even stronger, maybe, now that he wouldn’t be able to do anything to help. Not after leaving the way he did, in the day he did.

_ ‘Bill, pull his arms! This thing’s going down, Bill, we have to pull him out now! Oh shit- he’s not- he’s not breathing, Bill he’s dying, Matt’s dying-‘ _

_ ‘Frank! Focus now, focus com’on- com’on Mittens, breathe for me’ _

_ ‘hmm-’  _

_ ‘he’s breathing’ _

_ ‘Matty? Fuck- Matty, I need you to wake up, sunshine. Matt, wake up. Wake up, we have to go. It’s going to fall apart, come on. We have to go’ _

__

“ _ Just...”  _ Curt’s voice startles him out of the dark places his mind went to, his eyes lost in a stain in his carpet.  _ “I’ve been calling him for days, man. He hasn’t answered me. I was just afraid that...”  _ he cuts himself off. There’s something he won’t share and Frank doesn’t blame him. He’s been away for too long for him to be entitled to any kind of information on Matt’s personal life. 

“Hm” he only grunts in return, not knowing what to say. Curt waits him out, for a while.

_ “You know... you said he reminded you of the pain. The shit you went through. All that happened” _

“Yeah” Franks drawls and doesn’t lie. He did say that and it made him feel like an asshole, after everything Matt had done for him. And Curtis hits the nail right on the head.

“ _ But Matt.. he went through hell to save our asses - yours, specifically - more than once. And you... you did the same for him. That’s gotta count for something, right?” _

Frank gazes through the window, trigger finger tapping against his right knee. An aftertaste of ash and coffee mixing in his mouth, like a distorted reflection of his life overseas and his civilian life, here. He understands Curtis’ words for what they are: truth, pure and simple. The connection they had, it had meant something. Their time together, their ups and downs.

“Yeah” it counts. How could it not?

How could Matty ever not count, when he filled up every crevice of Frank’s heart? When he took over the place and made himself a home, right inside his ribs, right in the tissue of his lungs?

The man who kissed him with sunshine in his eyes, who put him back together. Who held him up when he had doubts, who brought him back when he got lost in his mind after the bullet. A beautiful,  _ wonderful  _ man who had taken a bullet for Frank more than once.

He swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing in nervousness.

“You.. have his number?” he can hear the satisfaction in his long-date brother when he dictates it to him.

“Took you long enough. Call him”

“I will” and he will, couldn’t keep away from him for a second longer. 

Fragments of memories take his mind, that night. Mixed with dreams and distorted remembrances. Things that didn’t exactly happen in the order he saw and heard, but that all formed a puzzle in the back of his head. A tapestry of Matt, their time in Kandahar, their time together hidden away from prying eyes.

The only memory that plays itself perfectly during the night, it’s one from the first time Matt took a bullet for him. 

It was unusual of him to accompany them in sunlight. He was usually in individual assignments dealt by Agent Orange during the day. Sneaking into places to get vital intelligence for their ops. That day, however, they were going into a nearby city for a stake-out, after intel came up that the same terrorist cell that had arms in Kandahar, were stationed in the small village too. 

They head over in their Humvees, walking armed in formation around the vehicles. Matt had been right by Frank, reporting everything he heard around him.

He remembers being exhausted, that day. On top of the torture he had to watch Orange dole out once again, he hadn’t slept well. They had dug an unmarked hole to bury an unmarked corpse again, Gunner and him. When he finally showered and headed to the tent, hoping for a good night sleep, he decided by the one by his sunshine’s side, falling asleep almost instantly, as soon as his head touched the pillow.

Matt had suddenly stopped breathing in the middle of the night, whole body going tense, and he only noticed because he woke up when he heard him whimper. Caught in a nightmare, thinking he was still trapped under a building.

Frank dreaded to think what would’ve happened, should he be in a cot farther away from him. After comforting him with quiet words, Matt had fallen back asleep and Frank hadn’t been able to do the same. Too concerned as he watched Matty’s chest rise and fall.

_ “You know what, Frankie boy?”  _ Bill asked him through the comms. “ _ This is such a perfect day for a stroll in the park with the boyfriend, don’t you think?” _

His unit had been messing with him for a month now, about him being too close to the Devil. It was all in good spirits, and they didn’t think too hard of it. They didn’t know the half of it, and it usually made Frank snicker. Bill, he knew. He teased Frank all day when he could. 

He didn’t care. He was too far gone with his man, and it turned him into a giddy idiot. That day, he just huffed a tired laugh under his breath and smiled. His eyes straying to Matt.

“There’s... static buzzing. I don’t know wha-” 

When they realized they were being ambushed, it was too late. They had twelve enemies surrounding them and Matt was screaming his name when the first shot rang through the air.

“Frank!” Matthew was in him in a split second. Body tackling his and suddenly spasming, recoiling with the impact of a bullet as they fell to the ground, rolling away to a safer place when the gunfire started. Frank had a hand in his waist when they finally stopped rolling, dust and dirt in his fatigues. Matthew hadn’t been using the blindfold then and Frank hated seeing the pain finally reflect in his eyes.

He barely flinched but his body went tense and recoiled at the burning heat of the trauma. Shoulder starting to bleed. Frank registers it was right in the right side of his chest, probably hadn’t gone through lung tissue, although they had to get him to a medic as soon as they could. 

“Matty” his voice is a rasp as he takes his face in his hands, checking his color and breathing. 

He started choking soon after.

“Com’on. Com’on Matty, on your back now. That’s it” his voice turned into a roar as it rised above the gunfire and screaming. “Man down! I need a medic! Man down!”

Daniels soon replicated towards Billy, the second in charge.

“Man down, sir! We need a medic here!” she was hit in the leg seconds after, dragging herself to a safe place as soon as she feel in the ground, groaning and snarling at the pain.

“Where’s the goddamn corpsman?!” he screamed, as Matt’s lips turned bloody. Definitely went through his lungs, he had twenty minutes to get to surgery, for the second time that year. 

“I need four on the perimeter, now!” Bill ordered as he took down hostiles, quickly taking a look at Frank covering fire when he could, and then Matt, putting pressure to a wound in his chest. Frank dropped his gun as soon as the magazine emptied, coming to check his heart rate. 

“Sweetheart, listen to my voice, yeah?” he ignored Michelle Daniels’ looks at him. She was the only woman in their team and he knew she was made of tough shit, but he hoped she’d keep quiet about this. “I’m going to drag you to the Humvee, and it’s going to hurt, but I need you to stay with me soldier, you hear me?”

“Not...”

“What?” Matt coughed a bit of blood out, smiling through bloody teeth.

“Not a soldier-... M’fancier” Frank snorted and shook his head. Nodded at Daniels in a silent compromise of coming back for her, checking if she did some first aid on her leg. 

Matt screams when he hosts him up, pain probably shooting like lightning all over his body. And Frank deliberately tries to delete from his mind the association with the day they kidnapped him, months ago. He uses his handgun to shield them, using his body to protect Matt’s as they finally arrive at the Humvee. He sees Watson going for Daniels and huffs out a relieved breath, putting his hand on top of Matt’s on his wound.

“Stay with me, Red” he whispers, waiting for the corpsman who substitute Curt after his leave, Trevor, to arrive. He’s younger, but he’s a good marine and a well-trained and Frank trusts him when he asks him to move away for him to check on Red.

“He’s bleeding into his lungs, sir. He needs surgery right now” his voice wavers slightly but he keeps going. Frank keeps himself from screaming and demanding him to do something. He must be Matt’s age, 25 or 26 years old, but he’s still trained. He starts messing with some of his supplies. “I will need to take some of the blood out of your lungs, you’ll feel some pressure” 

Matt nods and Frank looks around. The gunfire dying down already, just three hostiles are left. Poindexter and Billy already on it.

Taking the blood out helps, but Matt’s breathing just gets worse. His coughs sounding wetter as he spits blood more often than not. 

“Fuck! Red, com’on!” he screams into his comms “Bill! What’s the ETA on the medical?”

“9 minutes. How is he?”

“Bleeding too much to wait 9 minutes, com’on Murdock. You don’t die on me today, you hear me? You don’t die today”

“Retreat!” Billy orders the others and Frank nods. Bill warns base and the medical through his comms and gets inside the Humvee. Watson and Poindexter clear the area as much as they can for them to go back the way they came. Riviera is the one to sit in the driver’s seat, driving like an insane fucker as Frank held on to dear life to Matty’s bleeding wound.

“You’ll be just fine, Red” he muttered at him. He’s sitting way closer than he’d be sitting to any other of his men, but Daniels and Bill don’t comment on it. “Don’t you make that death face at me, you hear me? Stop looking at me like that”

“I guess you can say-” Matt coughs again ”- that I have a bleeding heart, huh?” 

“You piece of shit” Frank snorts at him, as the others laugh. He keeps putting pressure on the wound, even bandaged as it was then, it was still bleeding too much. 

“I’m so glad it didn’t hit my -” another cough ”- my eyes, wouldn’ kno’ wha’ to do without ‘em” he slurs out and Billy shakes his head with a smile, taking Matt’s hand in his.

“You’re the toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever met, Mittens” Frank smiles at him. 

“At the end of this tour, you’ll be half-sieve, half-man, Murdock” Daniels jokes, and they laugh. There’s nothing more than can do in a place with so much death. Nothing but find a piece of good in the dark pile they were buried in.

Daniels was transferred back in the same week, needing physiotherapy to regain the movements in her ankle and leg. Matt was still in strict orders to rest for another week when Rawlins barged in and sent him on a mission. 

He came back with a few stitches loose, bleeding slowly through his clothes, but holding the information Orange asked him to bring him. Red had passed out soon after, falling into Billy’s arms and soon being taken to the medic bay.

Frank had almost attacked him that day, being held back by Gunner and Poindexter, cursing the man to all nine circles of hell. Curiously, he hadn’t been dishonorably discharged as he would’ve been in any other occasion. 

It takes Frank five days of thinking and hesitating before he finally presses the button and makes the call. Five days remembering that day. Matt jumping so easily, with not a second thought for his own before using his body as shield for him. 

He calls him when it’s night and he had just gotten off a videocall with Frankie and Lisa. 

_ “Yes?”  _ the voice on the other end of the line is soft and tired. Almost small in confusion. He wonders if Matt isn’t used to getting calls from unknown numbers. The tone of his voice when he hesitates reminds him of that day they had finally talked properly. Their second or third week into the tour, Matty sitting in the cot by Frank’s and asking what made him upset and how he could help. Not knowing how to give comfort, so unfamiliar with social relations.

So isolated from the world, bred into violence and yet to gentle. So foreign to kindness but so willing to give it. He was afraid back then that Matt would give it all up and run dry of the sunshine he carried in his small smiles and understanding eyes.  Afraid that that spirit would go cold and his body and mind would finally give up under just too much abuse and violence.

Since he left him, Frank had been afraid that he had been the one to finally do it. To finally snuff out that sunlight from his baby browns.

“Hi, Red” it’s a rasp and it comes out in half a growl. He feels out of control; but then, that’s how Matty had always made him feel. 

There’s a small, almost breathless inhale through the phone.

“ _ Frank?”  _

_ Fuck. _

His voice sounded crushed and small in disbelief, at the same time that it resonated  _ hope  _ somehow. Overwhelmed and not completely understanding, as if still trying to catch up.

Matt could stand a gunfire, a bullet wound without flinching. It was the other things, the people-related things, that got him flinching and confused. Small things Frank had observed before: not understanding when someone was kind to him, when people willingly helped him in the field, when they came back to rescue him. Overwhelmed when Frank whispered he loved him, crying into his arms.

“Yeah.. It’s me” 

_ “Oh” _ Frank sighs at his uncertain whisper.

He thinks of a hundred lies he could come up with. A hundred excuses for the call. He goes with the truth. 

“I just... wanted to talk to you again” he can hear a shuddery exhale, closes his eyes. It’s like it had just been whispered into his ear.

_ “I... see”  _ Matt’s tone is still uncertain and they fall quiet. Frank tries to indulge himself without feeling guilty. Just hearing him  _ breathe  _ after pushing him away for so long is a balm to an aching, open wound. It makes a tension he never realized was there unravel in his chest.

When he talks, he tries to be as quiet as possible. Doesn’t want to risk and break this peaceful spell. “What have you been up to?”

_ “I... studying. Working” _

“So it worked out? Columbia?” 

_ “Yes, I... got enrolled in Law School” _

“Yeah. You’d be used to be swimming with sharks at feeding time” Frank tries a joke, uncertain how Matt will take it. But he chuckles and  _ goddamn it, what a beautiful, beautiful sound. _

_ “I can’t help it, I’m just drawn to the fluffy teeth”  _ It’s good to hear him joke back, Frank smiles bigger than he ever did, facial muscles straining with it. 

“Don’t think they like bony”

_ “I’ll let you know I’m delicious”  _ he fakes a scandalized voice in a quiet tone and Frank snorts. There’s a lump in his throat, suddenly, and he realizes how much he had missed this. Missed how  _ easy  _ they fell in pace with each other, how synchronized they could get. How lovely his voice sounded close to his ear. How sweet.

They get quiet again. It’s slightly awkward now.

_ “And you, Frank?” _

“I’ve been working with dogs” Matt makes a surprised hum in response. “Yeah.. my very own shark recommended me a kennel in need of work, and I ended up staying”

_ “You did love dogs”  _ Frank smiles at the small tone  _ “Remember Chips?” _

“Yeah” Frank laughs “Yeah, I remember Chips. Goddamn dog could smell them miles away but couldn’t tell the difference between a gun and a bomb” Matt starts chuckling with him and Frank feels like his whole chest was lit in warmth and light. “Stupid dog”

_ “He was a bit but...” _

“Hm?”

_ “We did invade Afghanistan”  _ Frank snorts and this time, they cackle. It makes him remember of nights in middle of a sandstorm, drinking and telling stupid stories and laughing like idiots until they lost their breath. By Billy’s and Gunner’s and Curt’s side. 

When they finally do stop, Frank doesn’t feel the fear in his chest, the hesitation. 

“Hey, Matt?”

_ “Yes?” _

“Can I meet you again?” his voice comes in a whisper again. Matty reducing him to his basic, speaking in hushed tones as if not to scare him away. As if whispering into the ear of a lover. He is quiet at the other end, but Frank doesn’t press him. He has no right.

_ “Coffee shops?” _ his heart falters a beat, the lump in his throat growing heavier.

_ ‘There are actual places just for coffee?’ _

_ ‘Yes there are Matty’ _

_ ‘You’re lying’ _

_ ‘I ain’t’ _

_ ‘Don’t lie to me’  _ Frank chuckled, their knees touching.

_ ‘I couldn’t lie to you, sunshine. Not even if I wanted to’ _

__

“Sounds good to me” he’s whispering again. Frank reckons he should feel pathetic, but it doesn’t cross his mind. 

_ “Alright” _ Matt whispers back.

“Saturday?”

_ “Yes, Frank. Saturday” _

“I’ll pick you up then”

_ “Okay. I’ll... I’ll be waiting”  _ there’s more meaning there than Matt would ever admit to, Frank knows. But he won’t let him down again.

He turns off the phone, and let’s that lump in his throat force a tear or two out of his eyes. The empty apartment suddenly feels too hollow, but he comforts himself with the promise of seeing  _ him  _ again. 

Frank goes to bed and, this time, he doesn’t dream. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! I have the next two works of this series already planned and I'll start the writing part soon enough. Will you guys stick with me till then?   
> Some of the music inspiring my chapters:
> 
> 01\. Berlin - RY X  
> 02\. Devil that I know - Jacob Banks  
> 03\. Goodbye - Apparat  
> 04\. To be alone with you - Sufjan Stevens  
> 05\. Atlas - Coldplay  
> 06\. Flesh and bone - Black Math


	7. My body clung to night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt doubts his grasp on reality after Frank's phone call. Foggy tries to cheer up his friend and ends up discovering some carefully hidden truths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys <3 I've been trying some different writing styles to get a better grasp on the character's emotions and thought processes, I hope it didn't get too confusing.   
> So, anyway. I tried to adapt this to Foggy finding out the truth in Daredevil season one, but inside this AU. It's a bit different since, unlike Canon, Matt and Foggy only know each other for roughly over a year and a few months. And, unlike Canon, Matt is not actively fighting and going after trouble. I hope you guys like it

_ My body clung to night. _

_ White light from the depth of the glacier _

_ floods into my skin _

_ reminds me- _

_ you walked on that lake. _

_ Leaving your tracks - skin, scars. _

_ \- Glacier, Bejan Matur _

__

_ ‘Matty, wake up. Wake up, we have to go. It’s going to fall apart’ _

__

Rubble, concrete. Above? No, below. Trapped.

Smoke, soot, fire. Heat, overwhelming.

Gunpowder? No. Bomb.

Blood. Everywhere.

Crawl, dig nails into the dust and rocks. Throbbing pain, blood dripping and soaking auburn hair and red fabric.

Pull,  _ keeping crawling, keep pulling. _

Choke down a scream, overwhelming pain on the side, on his guts, on his lungs. 

Hip has a hairline fracture. Three broken ribs. Punctured lung. Deep muscle bruise in the lombar. Twisted ankle. 

Blood falling in his face, in his neck. Blood pouring out of a wound. Metal piece speared through his guts. 

_ Pain. Too much.  _

No organs severely damaged, deep kidney bruising. Keep going,  _ keep pulling. _

Consciousness fading.

_ Fading, fading, fading. _

Concrete and rocks, creaking.

_ It’s going to collapse.  _

He needs to get out, needs to find a way out. Keep pushing,  _ keep pulling. _

Can’t pass out now.  _ Oh god, don’t let me pass out now. _

Have to get out. Have to find air. Collapsing lungs. He has minutes. He needs to find Curtis.

_ He needs to find Frank. _

Find them. Find  _ him. _

It’s cold. There’s water underneath him. Water from burst pipes. Soot falling like snow, clinging to his blood soaked hair.

_ Crawl. _

Sounds dissolving. Muscles turning liquid.

A heartbeat.

_ Frank. _

__

_ ’...need...up, love. Matty, wake up. Wake up’ _

__

__

__

__

__

__

Matt had a moment of giddiness, of overwhelming joy and hopefulness before he froze. The phone in his hand suddenly felt heavy and he lost his breath, getting up and walking backwards until his shoulder blades met the wall of his loft, shrinking against it and sitting with his knees to his chest.

Because there was  _ no way  _ it had just happened, was there?

Matt hadn’t hallucinated in so long, he had been doing well, even. The last time had been over an year ago, hearing Billy’s voice right next to him when he had been dead over seven months. But how could he know, really? Maybe he had been hallucinating all this time, with small things his brain couldn’t pick up on.

When his chest stops burning and his lungs stop squeezing painfully, he figures out how to take a screenshot and dictates a message to Foggy, sending him the picture. He knew the last person to call him was Claire. Matt hoped there was really another number there. He really did.

He just didn’t know what he’d do if it proved he had actually just talked to Frank. 

_ “It’s a phone number, the first one on the list. The second is under Claire, the third is...”  _ Matt blocks the screen and puts the phone aside. 

_ ‘I’ll pick you up then’ _

_ ‘Okay. I’ll... I’ll be waiting’ _

__

His left hand shakes when it reaches for the shower handle, burying his head under the shower head. Matthew doesn’t try to rationalize how he got there, his limbs are cold and they shake too much. He doesn’t bother turning on the hot water, and lets himself freeze under it. Skin going numb and over sensitive at the same time.

“Frank” he tests the name in his lips in a mumble. He had been careful not to say it, to let it roll out of his tongue the last year. It had been addictive since the start, since their first weeks into the tour in Afghanistan. It was a strong and intense name, like the man who carried it.

Some time after turning the faucet on, he finds himself sitting on the tub, hugging his knees close to himself, feeling fragile and brittle. The cracks in his brain seem to root like webs all over his body and the cold keeps them there, like an ephemeral sculpture. Doomed to break into pieces.

There’s something eerily comforting in the cold. No memories of the heat of a never ending sun and scalding sand. No memories of heated skin against his, heated mouth enveloping his own. 

Matt gets out of the bathroom shaking and with numb lips. There’s a certain lethargy in his steps as he finds his phone again.

“Call Foggy.” 

_ “|Calling: Foggy|” _

He tries to be as vague as possible. Explains his friend he’s just not really up for working today. Murdock doesn’t want to lie, and so he doesn’t. Doesn’t make up any fevers or coughs he doesn’t have. But it’s the first time in a year interning at Foggy’s that he calls in and his friend gets alarmed.

_ “Buddy, you doing good? You can talk to me, ya know?” _

Matt couldn’t. Not really. But he hides so much, and so he doesn’t lie.

“I’m fine, just...” his eyes roam uselessly around “It’s just not a good day, Foggy.”

There’s silence on the other side, only the sizzling over the line and the buzzing of the phone, and his neighbor’s TV and her old heartbeat.

Matt wonders what Foggy is thinking about. The two times he saw him have a panic attack, including the day they met. His shutdowns, which Foggy witnessed once. His inexplicable depression during the month of June. 

The fact that he hides so much makes his throat close and a bitter taste splash against the back of his tongue. He’s all frayed, raw nerves in quiet resignation. He had been like that with the others too, in the beginning. Billy had been the first to break through his walls, knowing exactly how he felt. He had been through the same: met Frank in boot camp when he was 20, met Curt few years later. Unknowing of how to trust and have support. 

Matt only ever had Bill’s support and friendship for a year. Elektra for months. And Frank...

Things had always felt never-ending with Frank Castle. Sunlight stopped and winds quieted when they found time to be close. All they had were those stolen moments, stuck in time. 

_ ‘Do you remember?’  _ he had asked him one day, cuddling to his chest.  _ ‘Life without fighting?’ _

Frank had quieted down in thought, looking down at the top of Matthew’s head.

_ ‘I do. Coming home to my Ma’s food. Homework. Playing basketball in Highschool. Thinking about pretty girls and pretty boys’  _ Frank had sighed, breath ruffling Matt’s hair and making him close his eyes.  _ ‘Being an overall brat’ _

Matt smiled.

_ ‘you?’ _

_ ‘I don’t know’  _ Matt sighed into Frank’s chest, cuddling closer, needing the warmth  _ ‘Sometimes, I think I do. My dad. The orphanage. But I think I was fighting even then’ _

__

“Hey” Matt opened his eyes, Foggy’s voice tethering to the bitter aftertaste of the present, hollow bones and cold skin on palpable floor. “I leave work early today. About 6. Can I swing by, take you out for a drink?”

“Are you asking me on a date, Counselor?” Foggy groans and Matt smiles.

“Ow man, I totally would. You got the looks  _ and  _ the brains. But Marci would kill me, and she pays half the rent” Matt chuckles weakly and uses the good humor to pretend he isn’t hiding everything from someone who has been by his side for the last year and a half, when everything was in shambles. Someone who, unknowingly, eased him into civilian life. 

“Alright”

“Really?” Why not? It’s not like Matt isn’t needing it.

“Yeah. Don’t get used to it, though. I’m not about the party life” 

“Damn. I had hopes too”

Matt smiles as he says his goodbyes. He takes an Ambien and drops back in bed, hoping that drugged sleep will be dreamless. Void of nightmares and void of memories. He hopes he won’t wake up to crushing lungs and screaming and bullets. 

He would usually hope that he doesn’t wake up to sweet kisses and whispered voices. But today, Matthew closes his eyes and tries to remember the scent of Frank’s skin when he’d bury his nose in his chest. It’s torture, but Matthew had always been good at withstanding that.

He finds it odd that the concrete jungle that is New York is what throws him off the rails. For all intents and purposes, it should feel like home. It’s the place he was born and the place he lived in for almost fourteen years of his early life. 

The sand had been disconnected. A flowing hourglass of slippery grains that slipped through his fingers before he could begin to make sense of it. A shapeless, ever-changing body that preyed on his open wounds and broken bones. There, Matthew had been terrified of himself and his handler, but he had certainties about the world he lived in. He knew the deserts and the ghost cities like he knew the scars of his body - a map of truths and sharp logic. 

Matt knew his place in the warzone. He knew his place under the hand of the man who beat him into a soldier. He had a blurry, vaguely outlined idea of himself, too. 

But here, in this place that should speak of comfort and certainty; in this place full of castles of concrete and glass. All hard, graphic and indubitable truths molded in metal girders and flawless architecture, Matt found himself unattached from reality and it’s bold lines and flow of time. Slipping like sand itself through the cracks in the pavement. Infusing into the shadows in the sidewalks. 

The city, still, doesn’t feel like home. Nowhere quite does. The closest it had felt was by Frank’s side. By his unit’s side.

_ ‘How long have you been here, Matt?’  _

_ ‘It feels like my whole life’ _

__

At Josie’s, he meets Foggy. There’s warmth around him and an easy-going smile. His heart beats concern, but it doesn’t change his welcoming arms when Matt huddles closer. His face strains in his smile, there’s something he’s seeing that worries him. Matthew wonders, for a flicker of a moment, how does he look to the people around him. Immediately drops the thought.

Too abstract. Too... pointless. 

“My young Padawan! Good to see you outside in the sun, away from the tempting shadows of the dark force” Matt’s expression twists in amused confusion. “You’re handsome in them skinny jeans, give me a twirl” Matt snorts.

“Why are you talking like that?”

“I thought that was how people your age talked” Foggy shrugs and Matt sits by his side, amused smile and his chest feeling ligther than it did before he came to meet his friend.

“People my age? Foggy, we’re both from 91” 

“You’re the one at school, buddy. Don’t blame me for feeling older. I actually found a grey hair these days. Can you believe it? Because I couldn’t” Matt shakes his head at his friend, still smiling amusedly. Feeling tethered to the present doesn’t hurt for once, and he tries to enjoy it.

“So. Scotch?” Foggy offers and Matt sighs.

“Something sweet today, I think” His stomach isn’t as settled as the rest of him seems to be, and he doesn’t want to tempt it to revolting.

“Do I smell romance in you, Matt Murdock?” 

“You don’t, must be your eyes” 

“Matthew Murdock, you nasty boy” Matt rolls his eyes as best as he can, but doesn’t look at Foggy, knowing it will be in his face, in display for the world to see. A voice from a time he can’t afford to think of now whispers by his ears.

_ ‘You’re an awfully bad liar for a ninja, Mittens’  _

_ ‘Since when do ninjas need to be good liars?’ _

__

“Aw, they grow up so fast! Who’s the lucky lady? Or gentleman? Or whatever the gender neutral version of lady is?” 

“Person?”

“I wanted a fancy one. Com’on, who’s the lucky one?”

Matt shakes his head. Thinks of lips warmed by sunlight and slicked with saliva finding his for the first time, a deep rumble of a voice vibrating against his chest. 

“ _ And... _ you got cagey”

“I don’t get cagey”

“Yes, my dope-ass friend, you do. Every time. At  _ random _ times, might I add. It’s kinda confusing, actually. I keep wondering what happens in your head. I mentioned a new coffee shop on 42nd to you once, you got all frowny”

“I’m not sure that’s a word”

“It is now. Your deflecting”

“Leading the witness”

“As the witness’ friend, I reserve the right” Matt shakes his head and can’t help a chuckle. 

“I don’t think that’s a thing”

“We’ll make it a thing. You lack imagination, Jedi”

“Fogs, you know I have no idea what a Jedi or a Padawan is, right?”

_ “Ohmygod”  _ Matt laughs. Drinking does weird things to his brain. Suddenly his mind’s there, and just as easily it drifts away. Ticking into noise and silence, alternating between the to. It drifts away from his body or maybe too deep inside of his mind. To a basement in a church orphanage, a man that heard the world just as he did.

_ ‘Weak. Get up’  _ Stick’s voice is derisive, but Matt tries even then. Wanting nothing more but to please.  _ ‘Get up and fight. Get up’ _

Dad’s voice was sweeter. Gentler. The last scraps he got before the world turned into blazing heat and scorching sand.

_ ‘Get up, Matty. Work to do’ _

__

Foggy’s face does something weird. Matt had two glasses by now, his senses turning foggy.  _ Ha, foggy. _

Matt turns his senses to whatever is intriguing his friend. His eyebrows shoot up.

“There’s something... at the bottom?”

“I think we got ourselves an eel” Matt snorted in disbelief. 

“You’re shitting me”

“Hey! Don’t curse at your boss! I don’t wanna hear that kinda language from you, young man” Matt snorted again. Foggy reminded him of Gunner, sometimes. A softer Gunner, who wasn’t as catholic and didn’t have a Texas accent.

“I’m not sure I wanna stay here now”

“Matt. We should drink the eel stuff”

“God, no!” 

“To bond, Matt! The strongest bonds are formed when facing hardships together- or.. whatever”

“No way, Foggy, that smells horrible”

“The eel stuff, Murdock!”

_ ‘Matthew. It’s your real name, isn’t it, Asset?’ _

_ ‘Yes, Ma’am’ _

She held herself like him. Same posture, same grace, same disregard for her own. Not a soldier. A warrior. 

“Ah, you know. She was real nice and all, but really Matt, who wears perfume named  _ Cumming?”  _

Matt cackles. 

_ ‘You look different’  _ Billy was sitting by his side, Frank had a bullet graze on his temple and was sleeping the narcotics off.  _ ‘Sometimes, when we go out. You act like someone else’  _

_ ‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about’  _ He did. Billy didn’t need to know that.

_ ‘It’s just... you fight like a dancer, you know? And you never aim to kill. But... sometimes, you change. When you’re more the Devil than anything else. You’re all rage and brutality and all you need is one word from Orange to-‘ _

_ ‘Stop please’  _ Billy did, Matt’s whisper making his heart falter.

_ ‘Do you... remember when it happens-?’ _

_ ‘Sometimes’ _

_ ‘Mittens, that’s...’ _

_ ‘I know. Just, please... Please’ _

Bill let it drop, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder as Matt held Frank’s left hand in his. He knew it wasn’t normal. But after that silent room and the crying man, all those years ago, Matthew didn’t question  _ his _ existence anymore. It was a part of him. 

“Please remind me to take you to the movies, once. It’s ridiculous. My future business partner won’t be an uncultured brat, I refuse”

“Foggy, I can’t see”

“Yeah, but... You can hear right? We put on audio description”

“ _ In the movies? _ ” Foggy was the one to laugh then, letting his forehead fall to the counter, empty beer bottle in hand. It was his second. 

Matt was having a good time. He just couldn’t keep track of time. Or where he was.

_ ‘There’s one type of war I don’t think you can win, Red’  _ Frank was teasing, Matt knew. He narrowed his eyes at him from his cot.

_ ‘What type of war?’ _

_ ‘Tickle war’ _

_ ’...’ _

_ ‘What?’ _

_ ‘You’re being ridiculous’ _

_ ‘You chickening out, Red?’ _

_ ’...’ _

_ ‘Pussy’ _

They ran around the place like lunatics. Matt had never laughed harder as he did when Frank caught him.

“Wai’ wai’ wait. Your  _ shitting  _ me. Matt Murdoh’, you play the  _ violin?”  _ Foggy was slurring hard, Matt giggled.

“Well... Yeah. I picked up on it after I came ba-“

“After you wha-... Ooh!  _ Margaritas  _ I love those”

_ ‘Matty? Matty? It’s my boy! Let me through! Let me through! It’s my kid! Matty!’ _

_ ’Dad, it burns-‘ _

_ ‘Don’t touch your face, Matty. You’ll be okay. You’ll be okay’ _

_ ‘Dad? I can’t- I can’t see! I can’t see!’ _

__

__

“Never saw you date, Murdock? You date?”

“Aw.. You know...”

“I don’t. That’s half the problem” Foggy giggles at himself.

“Just... ther’ was one night, few months ago, I guess? Jus’ tha’”

“A night huh?”

“Shut up, Foggy”

“What about the mysterious object of your affections?”

“Aw... I though’... thought t’was all over, see?”

“Oh no, old love” Foggy looks like he’s tearing up to. Or so Matt thinks. His senses are all fuzzy. 

“Yeah. T’was beautiful... Bu’ it all wen’ to shit, Fogs. All wen’ to shit”

“That shucks man... what happen’d?”

“ _ Bang  _ Foggy.  _ Bang” _

__

__

_ ‘Hey hey hey easy! Easy.. Red? Easy, Red, com’on! Matt! Matt, I got you. I got you out. You’re not there. You’re not there anymore, I promise. Breathe, Matty, come on. Sweetheart you’re not there anymore. I’m right here with you. I’m not going anywhere’ _

__

__

When it’s midnight (or is it later? It might be dawn. Matt wouldn’t know) they stumble to Matt’s apartment. He hangs on to Foggy’s elbow, his spatial orientation failing him. He leaves Fogs passed out in his bed and drops on the couch, fingers finding the dog tags Billy and the others had gotten him. 

_ “Asset. Report.” _

Bloody, bloody hands. 

Can’t remember how he got there (how did you get here?)

_ where am I? where am I? _

Iraq? No, Syria. 

_ What am I doing here? _

“ _ Now. Report.” _

What?

Blood, drying up.

Tacky in his skin. Crackling like leaves. 

_ Bad boy, Matthew.  _ Dad’s voice floats to him like a fragment of a dream. A memory too distant to make sense.  _ Bad boy, Matthew. Don’t throw the glass, they break when you do.  _

They break. Oh,  _ god, they break.  _

Breaking bones, breaking skulls, making them bleed. They bleed everywhere.

Snapping ligaments, ripping muscles, tearing skin -

He did that. Matt did that. ( _ the Devil did it) _

No. Matthew did it. His hands were the bloody ones. 

_ Bad boy, Matthew. _

A sting. Someone slapped his face. Leather glove.

_ “Asset. Report” _

His nose bleeds. 

_ “Yes, sir” _

__

__

His chest feels raw and burning when he wakes up, left hand shaking harder than the right one. His heartbeat is thundering on his ears and constricting in his chest. Lungs contracting for a breath that doesn’t come, his muscles not working. 

Matt’s ear rings, the right one. It pierces like needle through his eardrums and pokes at his overwhelmed brain. Suddenly, he can move. Bile splashing on the back of his throat, belly muscles quivering in an effort to retch even when Matt clamps his lips down. He’s too cold. His skin is too hot. He wants to walk to the rooftop and feel the air in his face, feel  _ freedom.  _ He wants to bury under the sheets and never come out again.

It takes him minutes to finally come to a sitting position. Shaking limbs too unsteady to do anything but hold on to his blanket, after that. 

His heartbeat finally starts slowing down, but there’s another one, close to him. One that isn’t slowing down at all. Pulsing faster and faster. Matthew doesn’t waste a second in letting a hand roam to the underside of the couch, finding the dagger he always keeps there. 

_ 12/7 pressure. Not an athlete. Medium physical activity. Soft leg muscle, not a runner. Stronger muscles on forearms and biceps, carries heavy things occasionally. Office worker? Heavy boxes. Hungover. Appendicitis scar- _

Matthew immediately takes his fingers away from the dagger, feeling all the blood drain from him. 

_ Foggy. _

Goddamn it.  _ Goddamn it. _

One second. Had Matt heard his heartbeat when he was still a bit more confused than right then, and he would have thrown the dagger.

At  _ Foggy. _

He tries not to choke when he inhales too sharply for his lungs, chest convulsing and ribs feeling smaller, pressing down on the soft tissue of his organs. Matthew shakes his head violently, rubbing a hand through his sweat damp hair. 

“Foggy, you scared me”

“Yeah” 

Something was wrong. Matthew notices it as Foggy slowly makes his way to the armchair. How his heartbeat beats anxious and angry, how his eyes flit around the place and focus with too much intensity on Matt’s chest. There’s something in his hands and he keeps looking down at it too.

“Fogs?”

“What’s that in your neck?” 

“Wha-” Oh.

His dog tags.

Matt immediately stuffs them back inside his sweater, but Foggy only huffs, something like disbelief and betrayal in his tone when he finally speaks.

“Do I know you at all?” his heart aches in his chest, head turning away from his friend. His ears focus with sudden interest in whatever it is he’s holding, only to notice the smooth tinkling of glass against a wood frame. The only picture Matt has in his possession. The one he kept in his nightstand.

He was an idiot.

“Foggy, I can explain...”

“Damn right you can!” his explosion makes Matthew flinch away, body still wired up to react negatively to screaming and displeasure. “I can’t believe... It’s been almost two years now. How could you hide something like this?”

“It’s not that simple”

“Isn’t it?! Is it simpler to lie about everything, about the blind thing, just to avoid saying something mildly important, like hum... I don’t know, that you were in the  _ freaking army?! _ ”

“It wasn’t... I wasn’t-“

“Yes you were!” Matt flinches again. He can’t help it, can’t stop it. His arms cover his middle and he slumps forward, protecting himself. Mind hard-wired to expect a punch, a kick, a cattle prod,  _ something. _

Nothing comes. And it leaves him on edge. Keeps him w _ aiting.  _

“Matt, what the hell... Why? Why did you lie? You were... you were a soldier?”

“I... it’s different”

“How can it  _ possibly  _ be different?!”

Matt curls his hands into fists because he can’t keep himself from giving Foggy what he wants. Not necessarily because he wants to talk about it, but because he hasn’t been trained out of compliance. 

(If they scream, they’re angry. If they’re angry, they hurt you. If they scream, give them what they want. Do what they tell you to)

“Child soldier” it slips out of his lips before he can’t tame his instincts out of it. It was the term his therapist used, the term Homeland Security used. And agent Madani, the agent in charge of their case. She had looked at him with sadness thrumming in her breathing and her heart but never pity. 

“You said you were blind-...”

“since I was nine, yes.”

“How is that possible? How can you see?” Foggy sounds more resigned now, voice still dipped in disbelief and betrayal, but less agitated. Good. No agitation is no boiling anger. That’s good. 

Matthew feels horrible that he’s comparing Foggy’s behavior to William Rawlins’. Hates that, even being dead for over two years, the man can still yank a leash on the back of Matt’s mind. Tame him into being what he wants to. Doing what he wants to.

“I can’t. Zero light perception. The chemicals ate through my nerves. They’re damaged and will always be”

“Then how the hell do you expect me to believe-?”

“I am a mutate” he hugs the blanket around himself, head turning away from his friend once more. “I can’t see. I will never see. But I can hear, and smell, feel and taste more than anyone else”

“Talk” 

It’s an order. Matthew whispers  _ yes, sir  _ in his mind, because that’s the only way he’ll get through this. Using old, ingrained habits. 

And so he does talk.

He tells Foggy about the accident, and his Dad’s murder. He tells him about the orphanage basement and Stick. He tells him about leaving with Stick when he was barely above thirteen with the promise of belonging somewhere and fighting for the good. Of the CIA agent conducting illegal business that they tried to take down. Of him thinking Stick was dead on the sand, of being whisked away and recruited off the books by Rawlins. 

He tells Foggy about Billy Russo. Gunner Henderson. Curtis Hoyle. Elektra Natchios. And when it’s time to talk about Frank, his voice fades away from his grasp. It turns into a rasp.

“What happened to them?”

_ I failed. That’s what happened. _

His one mission was to aid them. To keep the marines, soldiers and SEALs safe. To conduct his part on the operation. He failed. 

“Curtis lost his leg to an IED. He has a vet group now” he whispers then, turning to the window, trying to track the moving sunlight “Elektra died from a stab wound, she was trained by Stick, just like me. Gunner was shot in the field, he died in a trench. He was from Kentucky. He was a catholic. Billy was shot five times by one of his team, he was my best friend”

“Matt...”

“And Frank...” he’s shuddering and his voice is unstable. Matthew knows there’s tears in his eyes but he doesn’t let them fall. “Frank was the best marksman and the best marine I’ve ever know. He got shot in the head by one of us after killing Rawlins and he survived”

His left hand shakes. Fingers with the ghost imprint of feeling the hole in Frank’s head, the blood drying in his clothes. 

Foggy has tears in his eyes. Maybe of frustration or too many emotions in his chest. Matt doesn’t know. Wouldn’t know. There’s a fragrance of sorrow, however. Of regret. 

He feels like a time bomb, then. Not a faulty structure, ready to crumble and collapse. But a ticking bomb.

_ Tick tick tick tick. _

“Why... did you lie?” there’s nothing but resignation left on Foggy’s tone, now. He’s in pain, and he’s feeling betrayed. His heart settled but it’s still faster than usual. 

“I don’t know” he does. He does know. He lied because he doesn’t know how to trust, not yet. He had unlearned it with a few, hurtful words when it took months for him to learn it again. He lied because he was too afraid of judgement, too desperate to be anything but the blood stained killer he had been back then. Too eager to try and distance himself from a time where things had hurt so much, but when life had meaning. For one long, perfect, bittersweet year.

Foggy shakes his head. Matt can tell he prefers the not knowing over any other lie. When he stands up, it’s with bleary eyes and a finger pointing at Matt’s chest. 

“It will take me a while to come to terms with this-“

“Of course-“

“But” Matt quiets down, right hand holding his left, shaking one. Trying to make it stop.  _ Why doesn’t it ever stop?  _ “But, if you need me...”

His face crumbles, then. He allows the tears he held back to fall, because Foggy’s still there, saying this now. But he’s not sure those words will beat true if he pays attention to his heart, and so he doesn’t.

“If you need me, I’ll be there. I may not understand it yet, and I’m still confused but... You’re my friend”

Matthew nods because he can’t talk. There’s a weight settling in his chest even as one leaves his shoulders. Anticipation and anxiety mixed in his ribs like a bitter soup. He nods and it’s all he does as Fogs walks to the front door and leaves, walking down the stairs. 

He remembers how Frank’s steps sounded on the graveyard’s grass when he walked away, that day. How his father’s footsteps sounded on the floor of their dingy home when he went for his boxing match and never came back. 

He hopes Foggy does. And he hopes Frank is coming back too. 

For once in his life, he desperately wishes someone would stay. 


End file.
